Dreams By No One's Daughter: Pitt Poetry Series
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About this ebook
Leslie Ullman
Leslie Ullman is professor emerita of creative writing at the University of Texas–El Paso (UTEP), where she established and directed the Bilingual MFA Program. She currently teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Ullman is the author of three poetry collections: Natural Histories (winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award), Dreams by No One’s Daughter, and Slow Work Through Sand (co-winner of the 1997 Iowa Poetry Prize). Her poems and essays have been published in a number of magazines and literary journals.
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Dreams By No One's Daughter - Leslie Ullman
I
HARD CIDER
Even to those who are dying, the season
shows its hand, filling the ditches
with jewels: mica fish and emerald mallards.
Draft horses prance in their filigreed
traces, heady with sun and a premonition
of frost. They barely touch the earth
as the farmers themselves spring from the ground,
in their prime, their wooden clogs
caked with sweet mud. Everything they touch
turns to sheaves, loaves, luminous
preserves; the scent of cooking strains
at walls and beams that surround
young wives. And everywhere trees, having
borne the brunt of summer,
rise stately as half-clothed women lifting
baskets to their heads. They have waited
in greenery and silence, suddenly
to cradle perfect apples.
Even to those who are dying, this land looks
as it would from the air, or to a Sunday painter
dozing on a hill—a quilt of gardens and threading streams,
hills in waves, green squares, russets, gleaming
pitchfork, the painted noontime jug. No smell of old sweat
lingering in homespun. No hard words with the wife.
No palm across the cheek, tears, thin gruels
in the early dusk that gathers itself up north.
Even to those who are dying, the last of the hummingbirds
is a bright leaf riding the wind, and the hawk
sharing its patch of sky for a time
too plump, too brightly feathered, to kill.
THE ORIGIN OF TEARS
You’re about to speak
and they take you
by surprise, little natives
beating drums in your throat.
A music the body listens to.
The push the lump from its
familiar cave, and your chest
aches with loosened rock.
Now your face melts, a child face,
boneless again in a landscape that blurs
to the salt water the world
once was, and your body cracks
into islands and fish and
bottomless space that somehow
does not fly apart.
The bird inside you screams.
You don’t make a sound. Grief,
dreaming among the fallen trees,
answers, suddenly light on his feet—
he seizes your dry
pod of a heart, summons
voice after voice you never use,
and now you are dancing, unable
to return to your country, hostage
until he has finished dance after dance