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You People

By Nance Van Winckel Nance Van Winckel

People, don't ask me again where my shoes are.

The valley I walked through was frozen to me

as I was to it. My heavy hide, my zinc

talisman—I'm fine, people. Don't stare

at my feet. And don't flash the sign of the cross

in my face. I carry the Blue Cross Card—

card among cards, card of my number

and gold seal. So shall ye know I am of

the system, in the beast's belly and up

to here, people, with your pity.

People, what is wrong with you? I don't care

what the sign on your door says. I will go

to another door. I will knock and rattle

and if you won't, then surely someone, somewhere,

will put a pancake in my hand.

You people of the rhetorical huh? You lords and ladies

of the blooming stump, I bend over you, taste you,

keep an eye on you, dream for you the beginning

of what you may one day dream an end to.

The new century peeled me bone-bare

like a first song inside a warbler—that bird, people,

who knows not to go where the sky's stopped.

Keep this in mind. Do you think

the fox won't find your nest? That

the egg of you will endure the famine?

You, you people born of moons with no

mother-planets, you who are back-lit,

who have no fathers in heaven, hear now

the bruise-knuckled knock of me. I am returned.

From your alley. From your car up on blocks.

From the battered, graffitied railcars that uncouple

and move out into the studded green lightning.

Dare you trust any longer the chained-up dogs of hell

not to bust free? Or that because your youth's

been ransacked, nothing more will be asked of you?

If a bloody foot's dragged across your coiffed lawn—

do not confuse me with dawn.

Now people, about the shoes: the shoes

have no doubt entered the sea

and are by now walking the ramparts of Atlantis.

I may be a false prophet, but god bless me, at least

I have something to say. I lay myself down

in a pencil of night—no chiseled tip yet,

but the marks already forming in the lead.

Source: Poetry (December 2004).

Biography

Nance Van Winckel's fifth collection of poems, No Starling, is recently out from University of Washington Press. She is the recipient of two NEA poetry fellowships. She is also the author of three collections of short fiction and teaches in the MFA programs at Eastern Washington University and Vermont College. She will be the Stadler Poet in Residence at Bucknell in spring 2009.

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