Note to the Reader
Copper Canyon Press encourages you to calibrate your settings by using the line of characters below, which optimizes the line length and character size:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque
Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so that the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible.
When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.
Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.
This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible.
for Bill, Lucy & Jack Abernethy
They are neither finite quantities nor quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities?
George Berkeley
Contents
One: Outside Are the Dogs and the Sorcerers
3 Who
5 Hurry
8 This Is Not a Poem/Fairy Tale
10 That Men Should Kill One Another
12 At the End of the Text, a Small Bestial Form
13 The Emptying of the Censers
14 Canto One
15 Barbed Wire
16 Beast of the Sea
17 To Do
18 Perspective
19 Hair
20 The Second Trumpet
Two: At the End of the Text, a Small Bestial Form
1 Beast of the Sea
2 Boy in Park
3 Beati mortui
4 Room
5 Masks
6 Game
7 The Invalid
8 Lottery
9 Rondeau
10 Milk Tree
11 The Woman Escapes
12 Binoculars
13 The Third Trumpet
14 A Dog, About to Pounce, Looks Back
15 For the Young Woman I Saw Hit by a Car While Riding Her Bike
Three: That Men Should Kill One Another
1 Cecidit, cecidit Babylon
2 The Book of Life
3 Twentieth-Century Poetry
4 Abel de Larue, 1582
5 The Cure
6 Six Days
7 Comedy
8 Ativan
9 The Second Death
10 The Common Cold
11 K—
12 Outside Are the Dogs and the Sorcerers
13 Midnight
14 Beast of the Sea
Four: A Dog, About to Pounce, Looks Back
1 Beast of the Sea
2 Oblivion
3 May Morning
4 Fiftieth Birthday
5 Of the Dead White Men
6 Tall Grass
7 Helicopter
8 Fantasy/Sci-Fi
9 Christ Appears in a Mandorla Enclosed by a Cloud
10 Door
11 The Martyr's Motel
12 The Accident
13 Ivan
14 The First Resurrection
15 Recall the Carousel
16 Nine Herbs
17 Atmosphere
18 Over
19 Present Perfect
About the Author
Books by Laura Kasischke
Acknowledgments