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POTD - Dire Wolf by Lucie Brock Broido

Ryan Nance March 8, 2018

Dire Wolf

By Lucie Brock-Broido

Sorrows, like a gathering of dire wolves, come in packs. To you,
I am not speaking anymore. Whom

Shall I address?

Now that you have gotten these things off
Your barrel chest, it is time for you to merge into the sobbing

Rain, like a one-room scene in Appalachia, smeared
By fog. I adored you as much as an aluminum

Bucket of storm after
A great unlovely silvered thirst. How

Nice for me. In the Pleistocene, the wild wolves roamed
In scattered sorrows over

Everywhere, prodigious in appetite, howling
At the hollow of

Everything empty like a throat coated
With the fabric of a bolt

Of red. There

Are things which can dismantle entirely
A spirit, such as the pathetic maledictive fear

Of loss. Of loss:
You get to speak of it, once

You are its intimate, and not before; it would be

"Appropriation." But in the great white rendezvous, where

I was brooding Just a while, you get to speak of dire love.

I was telling a few friends recently about Lucie's collection of figurines: horses being hatched from eggs.

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POTD - You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World by Lucie Brock-Broido

Ryan Nance October 29, 2013

You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World

BY LUCIE BROCK-BROIDO

Tell the truth I told me When I couldn’t speak.

Sorrow’s a barbaric art, crude as a Viking ship Or a child

Who rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer

In the 1930s Toward the iron lung of polio.

According to the census I am unmarried And unchurched.

The woman in the field dressed only in the sun.

Too far gone to halt the Arctic Cap’s catastrophe, big beautiful

Blubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of ice.

I am obliged, now, to refrain from dying, for as long as it is possible.

For whom left am I first?

We have come to terms with our Self

Like a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape suit.

I had the immense pleasure of studying with Lucie. She has this amazing collection of porcelain figures of horses hatching out of eggs.

She introduced me to Thomas James.

She is lovely.

POTD - Reasons by Thomas James

Ryan Nance October 26, 2012

Reasons

BY THOMAS JAMES

For our own private reasons
We live in each other for an hour.
Stranger, I take your body and its seasons,
Aware the moon has gone a little sour

For us. The moon hangs up there like a stone
Shaken out of its proper setting.
We lie down in each other. We lie down alone
and watch the moon’s flawed marble getting

Out of hand. What are the dead doing tonight?
The padlocks of their tongues embrace the black,
Each syllable locked in place, tucked out of sight.
Even this moon could never pull them back,

Even if it held them in its arms
And weighed them down with stones,
Took them entirely on their own terms
And piled the orchard’s blossom on their bones.

I am aware of your body and its dangers.
I spread my cloak for you in leafy weather
Where other fugitives and other strangers
Will put their mouths together.

When I was first introduced to James, it was in a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. His Letters to a Stranger, published in 1974, had gone out of print. It was my professor, Lucie Brock-Broido who brought him to me. Her story of being introduced to him by my other, elder professor Richard Howard is itself a compelling story. The book, his only one before he committed suicide, is back in print, in no small part thanks to these twin literary lions.