I don't want words to sever me from reality. I don't want to need them. I want nothing to reveal feeling but feeling―as in freedom, or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond, or the sound of water poured in a bowl. ―from "Gravity and Center" In his sixth collection of verse, Henri Cole deepens his excavations and examinations of autobiography and memory. These poems―often hovering within the realm of the sonnet―combine a delight in the senses with the rueful, the elegiac, the harrowing. Central here is the human need for love, the highest function of our species. Whether writing about solitude or unsanctioned desire, animals or flowers, the dissolution of his mother's body or war, Cole maintains a style that is neither confessional nor abstract, and he is always opposing disappointment and difficult truths with innocence and wonder. “[Cole writes] in a voice that buzzes with emotion . . . His best book to date.” ― Publishers Weekly Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, to a French mother and an American father. He has published ten previous collections of poetry and received many awards, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and the Award of Merit Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also published Orphic Paris , a memoir. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, and teaches at Claremont McKenna College. Blackbird and Wolf By Henri Cole Farrar, Straus and Giroux Copyright © 2007 Henri Cole All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-374-53112-6 Contents Title Page, Copyright Notice, Dedication, I: BIRTHDAY, Sycamores, Mimosa Sensitiva, Gulls, Oil & Steel, Ambulance, Chenin Blanc, Maple Leaves Forever, Twilight, Migraine, To Sleep, The Erasers, The Tree Cutters, Birthday, Self-portrait with Hornets, II: GRAVITY AND CENTER, Gravity and Center, American Kestrel, Loons, Quarry, Homosexuality, Haircut, Toxicology, Poppies, Bowl of Lilacs, Shaving, My Weed, Self-portrait with Red Eyes, Embers, Wet Apples, III: DUNE, Beach Walk, Eating the Peach, Dead Wren, To the Forty-third President, Hymn, The Lost Bee, Persimmon Tree, Bees, Mirror, Dune, Acknowledgments, Also by Henri Cole, About the Author, Copyright, CHAPTER 1 BIRTHDAY     SYCAMORES     I came from a place with a hole in it,     my body once its body, behind a beard of hair.     And after I emerged, all dripping wet,     heavy drops came out of my eyes, touching its face.     I kissed its mouth; I bit it with my gums.     I lay on it like a snail on a cup,     my body, whatever its nature was,     revealed to me by its body. I did not know     I was powerless before a strange force.     I did not know life cheats us. All I knew,     nestling my head in its soft throat pouch,     was a hard, gemlike feeling burning through me,     like limbs of burning sycamores, touching     across some new barrier of touchability.      MIMOSA SENSITIVA     Polishing your eyeglasses, I try them on     and watch the nurses hoist you — blind, giggling,     muttering nonsense French. For a moment, like a spider,     you dangle at the edge of the present,     pondering who I am: "Ma, I'm Henri.     You made me." Then my eyes flee the here-and-now.     You're pulling yourself out of the deep end,     your skin like the seamless emulsion on a strip of film.     Sensuality is confirming beauty. I'm eleven again.     Then the banal shatters everything.     In a tangled nightgown, your skin marsupial,     you're pawing through leaf mulch for pain medicine     you can't function without. The thrash of your hands     smolders like wet black ash.     In Chinese, the basic phonetic value of horse, ma,     turns up in the word for mother.     "Horse-mother, look!" I cry. Soldier-ants     are suckling on the big pink heads of your peonies.     Horse-mother flickers like a candle in the dark.     Horse-mother, why does your mouth have a grim set?     I know that all beneath the sky decays.     I know that you once cradled me in sleep,     our belly empty as a purse. "Horse-mother, look!"     I repeat. The mimosa tree is going to sleep,     its tiny pinnate leaves closing and drooping,     like you, sensitive to light and touch,     mimicking death when I push a needle into you     and bright beads run out, as from a draining bird.      GULLS     Naked, hairy, trembling, I dove into the green,     where I saw a bulky form that was Mother     in her pink swimsuit, pushing out of water,     so I kicked deeper, beyond a sugar boat     and Blake's Ulro and Beulah; beyond grief, fate;     fingers, toes, and skin; beyond speech,     plagues of the blood, and flowers thrown on a coffin;     beyond Eros and the disease of incompleteness;     and as I swam I saw myself against the sky     and against the light, a tiny human knot with eyes