The Grasses: A (Partial) Cento

Bitter as the bolted lettuce,

without adequate information,

you awake, justly terrified of this world.

In immortal cobalt, unchanging viridian,

death and darkness, get you packing,

to snap and sparkle through the winter’s night.

Since Tuesday, the youngest soldiers

—and thousands of unemployed whiteboys—

without understanding, out of the wall,

come from a more dream-heavy land,

combine—and the just and fair allotment of

scarlet banners, flapping wind

(like frames on a strip of film),

throws back a glassy archangel that beckons.

In a time when poetry will no longer

hear wind move trees like this,

people are walking out of the ragged fields

—I should be home to bring the harvest in—

the vetches purple, near invisible,

and the brown mouth of the Salinas River going green,

light breaking through from behind.

You a walking forest        me with city smoke,

we are spent, mistake me not. We restless and ruled

one bird from another, a shrub,

the living, beyond all that is hated or loved—

in the fine steely wires which run to and fro between love & economics.

The key, in order:

“Core Samples,” Maureen McLane

“Goofy’s Opening a Snapdragon,” David Shapiro

“pantoum: landing, 1976,” Evie Shockley

“The Prodigal,” Derek Walcott

“Easter Hymn,” Henry Vaughan

Sonnet 23, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman

“Bluebird Houses,” James Tate

“The Heroin of My Youth,” Lorenzo Thomas

“The Creations of Sound,” Wallace Stevens

“O’Sullivan Rua to Mary Lavell,” W. B. Yeats

“A,” Louis Zukofsky

“Recoveries,” Theodore Weiss

“The Holiday Season,” Jane Shore

“December,” Grace Schulman

“A Movement in Utopia,” Gjertrud Schnackenberg

“Being and Seeming, in Public,” Liz Waldner

“One with Others,” C. D. Wright

“Kyrie,” Ellen Bryant Voigt

“White Conclusion,” Chase Twichell

“Char,” Adrienne Rich

“Something Like Dying, Maybe,” Tracy K. Smith

“Mediated,” Carol Mirakove

“Err,” Eléna Rivera

“The Lost Colony,” Susan Stewart

“Don’t Let Me Be Lonely,” Claudia Rankine

“Affections Must Not,” Denise Riley