Robert Schumann Is Mad Again - Softcover

The author of 26 collections, Dubie’s many honors include the Bess Hokin Prize from the Poetry Foundation and the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry.

Boston & Maine

The salt marsh at sunset, something
of a carved rosewood landscape
for an early 20th Century toy train set
that’s left the mountain’s tunnel,
the smoke of the woodbox
darkening everything in the heavy
mix with steam, the mens’ faces of ivory
washed in the ink. Leaving the mountain,
the eyes of the children in the sleeper
opened again. The conductor
chuckled. A horse
in the mail carriage screamed.

This woke the station master
who looked at his wife, saying,
it is the 2:11―3hrs late. She
smiles, “Darling, I’m not
sure that we’ve ever formally
met?” He quickly removes his hand from her hair.
She wakes. The train edges
under a water tower. The paper birds
on the salt marsh are lifting
into the night’s stars under the very soft rain.
Ghost Writer

The blue and white Cessna coughed out over the desert floor―
there is a blinking margin of starry night that’s canal water.
A clumsy coyote descends an old hill of garbage. Death is visiting
my friends. No one is impressed any longer. Column inches of suns
in the stagnant water. Death, in fact, is shy and clumsy―looking
over its shoulder. The unscheduled slinking through a moon field
of vulgar agave and crushed shell-life that is some millionaire’s
lost airstrip. The wife inside is happy and undressing―she sips
gin while the swamp cooler asks her to please finish that damn
crossword puzzle in Wednesday’s newspaper: reticule.
anathemata. divan. hemorrhage. Her left hand releases
a very fat string of pearls. She is just now sleeping in a chair.
Not another human for hundreds of miles. And it is surely
a wonderful world. perpendicular. charlemagne. Light rain.
The cooling light from her husband’s fish tanks.
The Old Women at Urnekloster House

–for Dorothy

Heisenberg on his aunts’ ceiling
counting the shut-ins. One
giving names to individual
tulip bulbs sighing with the fish bones
and red potting soil on wet newsprint,
another, also mathematical,
obsessing on the current sum of pewter spoons
and the third wrapping in wool
a hot teapot her younger sister says
is the color of marmalade custard.

The dog is larger than the rug
he chooses to sleep on
and he’s suffering from arthritis.
When he is finally dead the three women
will drag him
down the stairs
on potato sacks they spent
the morning sewing together
as a burial sled.

(The blue clock beside the spring onions
should know how long it took
to arrive at the moment
where suddenly it stops
forever but without the usual importance.
However, physically
its perfect enamel face is not self-conscious
like cereal caught in the sergeant’s mustache
if his mouth, still worse,
is a black hole and nursery of suns unbelievably
adamant at the center of its universe.)

The fall from one step to the next
releases methane from the dead dog
and Heisenberg thinks this is all
stacked like a model
for reluctant space/time
with a cold flat outcome
for both the dog and the cosmos.