Oration: Half-Moon in Vermont

By Norman Dubie b. 1945 Norman Dubie

A horse is shivering flies off its ribs, grazing

Through the stench of a sodden leachfield.

On the broken stairs of a trailer

A laughing fat girl in a T-shirt is pumping

Milk from her swollen breasts, cats

Lapping at the trails. There's a sheen of rhubarb

On her dead fingernail. It's a humid morning.

Tonight, with the moon washing some stars away,

She'll go searching for an old bicycle in the shed;

She'll find his father's treasures:

Jars full of bent nails, a lacquered bass,

And the scythe with spiders

Nesting in the emptiness of the blade

And in the bow of its pine shaft.

Milling junk in the dark,

She'll forget the bicycle, her getaway,

And rescue

A color photograph of an old matinee idol.

Leaving the shed, she'll startle

An owl out on the marsh. By November

It will be nailed through the breast to the barn.

In a year the owl will go on a shelf in the shed

Where in thirty years there will be a music box

Containing a lock of hair, her rosaries,

Her birth certificate,

And an impossibly sheer, salmon-pink scarf. What

I want to know of my government is

Doesn't poverty just fucking break your heart?

Source: The Mercy Seat: Collected & New Poems 1967-2001 (Copper Canyon Press, 2001)

Biography

Norman Dubie was born in Barre, Vermont in 1945, the son of a radical minister and a nurse. Dubie began writing poetry at age eleven and was influenced by both his father’s Sunday sermons and his mother’s tales of hospital life. Acknowledging his debt as a writer to his parents, Dubie noted in an interview with Poets & Writers magazine that “I got the weirdest introduction to writing from them—my mother, because she would come . . .

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