Once again, The Nation announces the winners of Discovery/The Nation, the Joan Leiman Jacobson Poetry Prize. Now in its twenty-sixth year, the annual contest celebrates poets whose work has not been published previously in book form. The new winners are: Erin Grace Brooks, Anthony Deaton, Andrew Feld and Sue Kwock Kim. This year’s judges are Mark Doty, Marie Howe and Susan Mitchell. Distinguished former winners of the competition, in which manuscripts are screened and judged anonymously, include Susan Mitchell, Katha Pollitt, Mary Jo Salter, Sherod Santos, Arthur Smith and David St. John. This year’s winners will read their poems at Discovery/The Nation ’00 at 8:15 pm on Monday, April 17, at The Unterberg Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue in New York City.       –Grace Schulman, poetry editor

After Troy

Not quite putting on what little power or knowledge pigeons lay claim to, she nonetheless bids them come. Launched off cornices,

cathedral arches, they glide through the gelid air in loose spirals, filling the square. Their wings beat a thin flat thunder.

She’s drifted in from the soot-marbled housing blocks piled across the Vistula, making her tram-line pilgrimage among the other pensioners

who haunt the Old Town’s benches. Strewn about her feet are crumbled bits of bread crust and each cupped palm she extends offers more.

The birds pullulate around her ankles, roost on her shoulders. Aloof from the others, one fatted pigeon mounts the faded

purple beret she wears against the late October freeze. This is when I steal the photo. All day I’ve kept the camera hidden inside an overcoat pocket,

afraid reducing Warsaw’s rebuilt bell towers and cobblestone vistas to thirty-six frames per roll would give me away as something I can’t help

not wanting to be. Yet I cannot resist the old lady capped and gowned, as she is, in feather. She lifts her arms to either side. The unmindful pigeons crowd,

peck along her flightless limbs, mocking her gravity as they alternately spread and fold their wings. Or maybe it isn’t mockery, but a mutual love that keeps them

flapping there and holds the woman still, engenders in that coupling a dream of union, where one light step might shift their weight to sky.

Anthony Deaton

Hanji: Notes for a Paper-Maker

for Liu Yoon-Young

Shaped like a slab of granite marking a grave, but light, airy as “spirit-sheaves” lashed from bloodroot or star-thistle,

this sheet is not for burial but making and making of: a caul of splinters boiled to pith, broth cast then clotted to blank.

I touch it, feeling grit and slub silk, rough as braille. Is it enough, is this what you dreamed of doing, making absence

palpable as pulp, though you laugh, seeing I’m shocked at how much work it took. Sow and mulch mulberry. Slash trunks down a year later–

chopping slant to sun so stumps heal, regrow–when their wood’s tender but strong enough to keep, no worms gnawing fleam or burl.

Soak, hack the black bark off, tilt your knife at a sharp angle to skive the green underskin without cutting away good grain.

Scald the peeled rods with cotton-ash so acid softens gnurl and knot. Pound for hours until they’re ground to shreds, skeins of unlikely thread.

You show me your blistered hands. Poor hands. When you strike a match to fire, I almost feel the skin sting, kerosene flaming yontan-coal.

I don’t know what it costs you to love this work. More than sulfur fumes tasting of slag, flintsparks cracking, engine-shunt as your cauldron simmers

hollyhock root to solder all the elements in a strange solution, an ecstasy, flecks shapeshifting, hissing milk, spit, quicksilver.

While it smolders you drag hung mold and slung bamboo-grill, sieving with steady arms, long strokes so fiber won’t snarl at the heart.

You wring water, strip your grid, letting grume clot to the hue of skull-rot. It’ll bleach in sun to snow, tusk-tallow, peroxide–

depending how long it’s left out, on weather–or you’ll dye it with beets, indigo, sweet potato, all the colors you have in mind.

In my mind you’ve become stern. “For what you want to be, nothing is something from another slant, a slate, a plot to engrave spirit

in flesh, mirror or window on an O. Now you know how hard the labor is. If your words aren’t worth my work, keep your mouth shut.” Sue Kwock Kim

Used by the Kind Permission of…

for P.T.

Woken, at six a.m., by the dense mist of song triggered by the sun’s rising, we recognized the first trick in that well-practiced sleight-of-hand morning would unfold for us: those small dots of clear light placed on the spider’s web outside, that shallow orange ribbon cut into the sandy drive.

And there were other signs, even when the afternoon had been reduced to just the single mockingbird and his sped-up, bad memory of other musics, that acknowledgments remained unsaid, as when you explained the discipline, the years of work that gave such ease to the flippant conversations

in the movie we watched that night, the uncredited studio-servitude which made possible that careful choreography of speech–an art as lost now as that which made the banks of glass flowers in the Natural History Museum, the translucent fibrous stalk of the iris, the fretwork of decay.

There, under fluorescent fixtures, a coelacanth, deep in a silt of ancient brown formaldehyde, turned its pre-historic eye towards the empty case you said contained antique sunlight, or could be a cenotaph for what can’t be captured, as leaves scratched at the window, pushed by restless air.

Andrew Feld

Concerning Starling’s Law of The Heart

“…the critical factor controlling stroke volume is the pre-load or degree of stretch of the cardiac muscle cells just before they contract.”       —Marieb’s Human Anatomy and Physiology

House a pump in four chambers, arteries and veins for pipes, valves for valves, pacemaker a tap

that won’t quit running. Let it. This is the sound of hope, deaf to the world, which in any case

has grown fond of complaining to itself. Forget the world. The matter at hand is plumbing–

good plumbing, too–the kind that won’t clog on its own grief and biles, nor corrode from

the sour spillage of anyone else. Say one day disease embraces you like a beloved, and won’t let go:

Until death do us part. To you, it will feel that the pump in your chest has plunged straight out

the window, and of course it’s a great loss–it’s everything. But your heart won’t break

or burst. Though it may not be whole exactly, it will work– will beat every day of your life

in order to pump down to the last blessed drop all the blood presented to it, and even a flood

would make it work just that much harder. You can depend on it by law. Frank-Starling’s Law.

Consider starlings, how they sing so in their river oak that turning at night from the darkness of Richmond to

Montrose, the blast of fortitude and joy knocks the breath from your chest, sets your dumb heart throbbing:

What is there to say? Consider it said. If my heart were more, more would be laid at your feet.

Erin Grace Brooks