Poetry Magazine
It includes the butterfly and the rat, the shit
It includes the butterfly and the rat, the shit
drying to chalk, trees
falling at an angle, taking those moist
and buried rootballs with them
into deadly air. But someone will
tell you the butterfly's the happy ending
of every dirge-singing worm, the rat
a river rat come up from a shimmering depth,
the shit passed purely into scat one can read
for a source, the creature that shadowed it one
longish minute. And trees, of course they
wanted to fall. It was their time or something
equally sonorous. And wind too knows its
mindless little whirlpool's not for nothing, not
nothing—that pitch and rage stopped. How else
does the sparrow's neck break.
Source: Poetry (June 2008).
Biography
Poet and essayist Marianne Boruch grew up in Chicago. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, including, most recently, The Book of Hours (2011); Grace, Fallen from (2008); and Poems: New & Selected (2004). Her memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (2011), concerns a hitchhiking trip she took in 1971. In the Blue Pharmacy (2005) and Poetry’s Old Air (1995) are collections of her prose on poetry. In an interview with Brooke . . .
Poems by Marianne Boruch
Poem Categorization
SUBJECT Social Commentaries
POET’S REGION U.S., Midwestern
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