an effigy of history,
each star the record of
a million, million cities
waiting to be burned
and lived in once again.
And farther into all
our darkened rooms
we go, as though in them
we might remember
something: where it was
we left the house key,
who it was that slept
in the small ocean of our bed,
and why we loved
their sleeping, why the door
seems different now
and unafraid
of being opened.
How long I waited
for the end of winter.
How quickly I forgot
the cold when it was over.
Grace Note
Itâs time to take a break from all that now.
No use the artifacts
from which Iâve built the buried outline of a life,
no use the broken breath
which I recall from time to time
still rattles in my chest. Yes, weâre due:
a break from everything, from use,
from breath, from artifacts, from life,
from death, from every unmoored memory
Iâve wasted all those hours upon
hoping someday something will make sense:
the old man underneath the corrugated plastic
awning of the porch, drunk and slightly
slipping off into the granite hills
of southeast Connecticut already, the hills sheaved off
and him sheaved off and saying
(in reply to what?) âBoy, that werenât nothing
but true facts about the world.â
That was it. The thing I canât recall
was what I had been waiting for.
It likely wonât come back again.
And I know better than to hope,
but one might wait
and pay attention
and rest awhile,
for we are more than figuring the odds.
About the Author
Kevin Powers is the author of the novel The Yellow Birds, which was a National Book Award finalist, a PEN/Hemingway Award winner, and a Guardian First Book Award winner. Powers was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University, and holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry. He served in the U.S. Army in 2004 and 2005 in Iraq, where he was deployed as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar. This is his first collection of poetry.
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Copyright © 2014 by Kevin Powers
Cover design by Oliver Munday
Cover copyright © 2014 by Hachette Book Group
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The following poems were originally published (some in slightly differently form) in the following publications:
âLetter Composed During a Lull in the Fightingâ in  Poetry Magazine,  2009
âWhile Trying to Make an Arrowhead in the Fashion of the Mattaponi Indiansâ in Cream City Review, 2009
âSeparationâ in The New York Quarterly,  Issue 66,