2004

Winners

• [First Place] Second Bearing, 1919 by Claudia Emerson
• [Second Place] To a Conductor's Tails by Lois Parker
• [Third Place] Fight by Bronwen Butter Newcott

Second Bearing, 1919

by Claudia Emerson

for my father


I have asked him to tell it—how
he heard the curing barn took hours

to burn, the logs thick, accustomed
to heat—how, even when it was clear all

was lost, the barn and the tobacco
fields within it, they threw water

instead on the nearby peach tree,
intent on saving something, sure,

though, the heat had killed it, the bark
charred black. But in late fall, the tree

broke into bloom, perhaps having
misunderstood the fire to be

some brief, backward winter. Blossoms
whitened, opened. Peaches appeared

against the season—an answer,
an argument. Word carried. People

claimed the fruit was sweeter for being
out of time. They rode miles to see it.

He remembers my grandfather
saying, his mouth full, this is

a sign, and the one my father
was given to eat—the down the same,

soft as any other, inside
the color of cream, juice clear

as water, but wait, wait; he holds
his cupped hand up as though for me

to see again there is no seed,
no pit to come to—that it is

infertile, and endless somehow.

To a Conductor's Tails

by Lois Parker

Augmenting every symphonic mode,
cadenza, and movement, from solo to solo
to tutti, they gave frenetic evidence
of something going on— in tempo
though behind the baton.
Now they snipped as scissors, straight
and prim, precisely demure, in a trice
became draperies in a frivolous breeze,
now a whole week's laundry awash
a capriccio,
then slowly billowing on the line
at the waist. All was performed between
the orchestra (oblivious through
four full suites) and the house
(mute and divergently tuned),
until tempered into harmony
by the sotto shout of a child:
Somebody's got to tell me, please,
what are they so excited about?

Fight

by Bronwen Butter Newcott

When I stand before the lamp, my shadow fills the wall,
no body, just a loose and unclaimed shape
spreading to the door that is already opened.
You, asleep, do not see this self-half covering you,
the green potted plant clawing at it.
Early this morning, we spoke of alchemy, the ache
to find solution, the right elements to combine,
anything to make the right color—
color what designates impossibility
or miracle: char-grey to hot-golden;
your white of sleep and my green Nasturtium leaves,
floating circles of plant I snap from their stems.
There are bird wings, tucked and diving,
dead seagull by the road,
your shadow in dream,
and mine passing over you, back and forth
in a pace like racing, like waiting,
watching to see if I hit too hard,
to see when you'll come to, raise your head again.