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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: | 9780393244977 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 01/16/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 452 KB |
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 |
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