Glori Simmons
We
have come to the age of double men
We wanted only to get it right for once,
borrowing autumn from the leaves.
The pile was an argument building gracefully,
but the words were forgetful
and lost their way.
I might have asked once:
Do you forgive me for being a girl?
Do you forgive me for being a prude?
•
All along they brought us porcupine quills,
cast off antlers, their kill to boil in the
kitchen.
Beneath ribbon-tied herbs there were conversations
in long silences. We listened for a warming
beneath the shiver. Perhaps under the mower
buzz
the fathers were not yelling regrets, but singing
childhood songs. And the boys looking down
gun barrels tunneled daylight rather than oncoming
trains.
Glori Simmons is currently a Stegner
Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. Her
book
of poems Graft, runner-up for the T. S. Eliot
Prize, was published in 2001. Her poetry
has been published in the Beloit Poetry
Journal, Quarterly West, and Fourteen
Hills, among
others. The title “We have come to
an age of double men” is from the Godard
film Pierrot Le Fou.
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