Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting Read Online Free PDF Page A

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
    It’s time to take a break from all that now.
    No use the artifacts
    from which I’ve 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, we’re due:
    a break from everything, from use,
    from breath, from artifacts, from life,
    from death, from every unmoored memory
    I’ve 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?) “Boy, that weren’t nothing
    but true facts about the world.”
    That was it. The thing I can’t recall
    was what I had been waiting for.
    It likely won’t 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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    First ebook edition: April 2014
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    The following poems were originally published (some in slightly differently form) in the following publications:
    â€œLetter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting” in  Poetry Magazine,  2009
“While Trying to Make an Arrowhead in the Fashion of the Mattaponi Indians” in  Cream City Review,  2009
“Separation” in  The New York Quarterly,  Issue 66,