Poetry Magazine
Heart Valve
They told me there’d be pain
so when I felt it,
sitting at my beat-up farm desk
that looks out glass doors
onto the browning garden—plain sparrows
bathing in the cube-shaped fountain
so violently they drain it,
the white-throats with their
wobbly two-note song
on the long way south still,
and our dogs
out like lights and almost
falling off their chairs
freed of the real-time for awhile
as time began for me
to swell, slow down, carry me out
of all this almost
to a where
about as strong a lure as love.
Source: Poetry (July/August 2010).
Biography
Elizabeth Arnold has published three books of poems, The Reef (1999), Civilization (2006), and Effacement (2010). A scholar as well as poet, Arnold earned her PhD at the University of Chicago. Researching the poet Mina Loy for her dissertation, she discovered the poet's lost novel, Insel. She edited the work, which was published by Black Sparrow Press in 1991. Arnold has received numerous awards for her work, including a Bunting . . .
Poem Categorization
SUBJECT Living, Health & Illness
Poetic Terms Free Verse
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