And Still It Comes

By Thomas Lux b. 1946 Thomas Lux

like a downhill brakes-burned freight train

full of pig iron ingots, full of lead

life-size statues of Richard Nixon,

like an avalanche of smoke and black fog

lashed by bent pins, the broken-off tips

of switchblade knives, the dust of dried offal,

remorseless, it comes, faster when you turn your back,

faster when you turn to face it,

like a fine rain, then colder showers,

then downpour to razor sleet, then egg-size hail,

fist-size, then jagged

laser, shrapnel hail

thudding and tearing like footsteps

of drunk gods or fathers; it comes

polite, loutish, assured, suave,

breathing through its mouth

(which is a hole eaten by a cave),

it comes like an elephant annoyed,

like a black mamba terrified, it slides

down the valley, grease on grease,

like fire eating birds’ nests,

like fire melting the fuzz

off a baby’s skull, still it comes: mute

and gorging, never

to cease, insatiable, gorging

and mute.

Source: New and Selected Poems 1975-1995 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997)

Biography

Acclaimed poet and teacher Thomas Lux began publishing haunted, ironic poems that owed much to the Neo-surrealist movement in the 1970s. Critically lauded from his first book Memory’s Handgrenade (1972), Lux’s poetry has gradually evolved towards a more direct treatment of immediately available, though no less strange, human experience. Often using ironic or sardonic speakers, startlingly apt imagery, careful rhythms, and . . .

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