Vice: New and Selected Poems

by Ai

Overview

Winner of the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry.

Collected here are poems from Ai's previous five books—Cruelty, Killing Floor, Sin, Fate, and Greed—along with seventeen new poems. Employing her trademark ferocity, these new dramatic monologues continue to mine this award-winning poet's "often brilliant" (Chicago Tribune) vision.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393320183
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/01/2000
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Ai (1947-2010) is the author of eight books of poetry, including the National Book Award–winning Vice. In 2009 she was named a United States Artist Ford Fellow. She was a professor at Oklahoma State University.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

    TWENTY-YEAR MARRIAGE

You keep me waiting in a truck
with its one good wheel stuck in the ditch,
while you piss against the south side of a tree.
Hurry. I've got nothing on under my skirt tonight.
That still excites you, but this pickup has no windows
and the seat, one fake leather thigh,
pressed close to mine is cold.
I'm the same size, shape, make as twenty years ago,
but get inside me, start the engine;
you'll have the strength, the will to move.
I'll pull, you push, we'll tear each other in half.
Come on, baby, lay me down on my back.
Pretend you don't owe me a thing
and maybe we'll roll out of here,
leaving the past stacked up behind us;
old newspapers nobody's ever got to read again.

    ABORTION

Coming home, I find you still in bed,
but when I pull back the blanket,
I see your stomach is flat as an iron.
You've done it, as you warned me you would
and left the fetus wrapped in wax paper
for me to look at. My son.
Woman, loving you no matter what you do,
what can I say, except that I've heard
the poor have no children, just small people
and there is room only for one man in this house.

    THE COUNTRY MIDWIFE: A DAY

I bend over the woman.
This is the third time between abortions.
I dip a towel into a bucket of hot water
and catch the first bit of blood,
as the blue-pink dome of a head breaks through.
A scraggy, redchild comes out of her into my hands
like warehouse ice sliding down the chute.

It's done, the stink of birth, Old Grizzly
rears up on his hind legs in front of me
and I want to go outside,
but the air smells the same there too.
The woman's left eye twitches
and beneath her, a stain as orange as sunrise
spreads over the sheet.
I lift my short, blunt fingers to my face
and I let her bleed, Lord, I let her bleed.

    CRUELTY

The hoof-marks on the dead wildcat
gleam in the dark.
You are naked, as you drag it up on the porch.
That won't work either.
Drinking ice water hasn't,
nor having the bedsprings snap fingers
to help us keep rhythm.
I've never once felt anything
that might get close. Can't you see?
The thing I want most is hard,
running toward my own teeth
and it bites back.

    THE TENANT FARMER

Hailstones puncture the ground,
as I sit at the table, rubbing a fork.
My woman slides a knife across her lips,
then lays it beside a cup of water.
Each day she bites another notch in her thumb
and I pretend relief is coming
as the smooth black tire, Earth,
wheels around the sun without its patch of topsoil
and my mouth speaks: wheat, barley, red cabbage,
roll on home to Jesus,
it's too late now you're dead.

    WHY CAN'T I LEAVE YOU?

You stand behind the old black mare,
dressed as always in that red shirt,
stained from sweat, the crying of the armpits,
that will not stop for anything,
stroking her rump, while the barley goes unplanted.
I pick up my suitcase and set it down,
as I try to leave you again.
I smooth the hair back from your forehead.
I think with your laziness and the drought too,
you'll be needing my help more than ever.
You take my hands, I nod
and go to the house to unpack,
having found another reason to stay.

I undress, then put on my white lace slip
for you to take off, because you like that
and when you come in, you pull down the straps
and I unbutton your shirt.
I know we can't give each other any more
or any less than what we have.
There is safety in that, so much
that I can never get past the packing,
the begging you to please, if I can't make you happy,
come close between my thighs
and let me laugh for you from my second mouth.

    I HAVE GOT TO STOP LOVING YOU
SO I HAVE KILLED MY BLACK GOAT

His kidney floats in a bowl,
a beige, flat fish, around whom parasites, slices of lemon,
break through the surface of hot broth, then sink below,
as I bend, face down in the steam, breathing in.
I hear this will cure anything.

When I am finished, I walk up to him.
He hangs from a short wooden post,
tongue stuck out of his mouth,
tasting the hay-flavored air.
A bib of flies gather at his throat
and further down, where he is open
and bare of all his organs,
I put my hand in, stroke him once,
then taking it out, look at the sky.
The stormclouds there break open
and raindrops, yellow as black cats' eyes, come down
each a tiny river, hateful and alone.

Wishing I could get out of this alive, I hug myself.
It is hard to remember if he suffered much.

Table of Contents

	from Curelty (1973)
	Twenty-Year Marriage	3
	Abortion	4
	The Country Midwife: A Day	5
	Cruelty	6
	The Tenant Farmer	7
	Why Can't I Leave You?	8
	I Have Got to Stop Loving You	9
	Young Farm Woman Alone	10
	One Man Down	11
	Hangman	12
	The Sweet	13
	The Hitchhiker	14
	Cuba, 1962	15
	Child Beater	16
	Everything: Eloy, Arizona, 1956	17
	from Killing Floor (1979)
	Killing Floor	21
	Nothing but Color	24
	Talking to His Reflection in a Shallow Pond	27
	29 (A Dream in Two Parts)	29
	She Didn't Even Wave	30
	Ice	32
	The Ravine	34
	The Kid	36
	I Can't Get Started	38
	Pentecost	40
	The Gilded Man	42
	from Sin (1986)
	Two Brothers	47
	Blue Suede Shoes	52
	The Prisoner	58
	Conversation	61
	More	63
	The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981	65
	The Mother's Tale	67
	The Priest's Confession	69
	Elegy	74
	The Testimony of J. Robert Oppenheimer	77
	The Detective	80
	The Journalist	85
	from Fate (1991)
	Go	93
	Jimmy Hoffa's Odyssey	97
	Boys and Girls, Lenny Bruce, or Back from the Dead	102
	General George Armstrong Custer: My Life in the Theater	107
	Interview with a Policeman	110
	James Dean	113
	Reunions with a Ghost	116
	Capture	118
	Evidence: From a Reporter's Notebook	122
	The Cockfighter's Daughter	129
	from Greed (1993)
	Riot Act, April 29, 1992	137
	Hoover, Edgar J.	140
	Hoover Trismegistus	145
	Jack Ruby on Ice	149
	Oswald Incognito & Astral Travels	156
	Miracle in Manila	161
	Finished	165
	Life Story	168
	Penis Envy	176
	Greed	180
	New Poems
	Rapture	189
	False Witness	192
	Sleeping Beauty	196
	Charisma	199
	The Antihero	201
	Rwanda	206
	Stalking Memory	210
	The Paparazzi	213
	Afterschool Lessons from a Hitman	215
	Chance	218
	Knock, Knock	220
	Blood in the Water	223
	Back in the World	226
	Flashback	230
	Momento Mori	237
	Visitation	240
	Star Vehicle (My Senior Year in High School)	242
	Passing Through	247
	Index	253

Editorial Reviews

1999 National Book Award, Winner