The Street Of Clocks: Poems

By Thomas Lux

The Street of Clocks, Thomas Lux's first all-new collection since 1994, is a significant addition to the work of an utterly original, highly accomplished poet. The poems gathered here are delivered by a narrator who both loves the world and has intense quarrels with it. Often set against vivid landscapes - the rural America of Lux's childhood and unidentified places south of the border - these poems speak from rivers and swamps, deserts and lawns, jungles and the depths of the sea.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Feb 12, 2003
• ISBN: 9780547346854

Thomas Lux

THOMAS LUX holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and is the director of the McEver Visiting Writers Program at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has been awarded three NEA grants and the Kingsley Tufts Award and is a former Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Atlanta.

Book preview

First Mariner Books edition 2003

Copyright © 2001 by Thomas Lux

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lux, Thomas, date.

The street of clocks / Thomas Lux.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-618-08624-2

ISBN 0-618-25750-0 (pbk.)

I. Title.

PS3562.U87 S77 2001

811'.54—dc21 00-066976

Printed in the United States of America

WOZ 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Book design by Melissa Lotfy

Type is FontShop Scala

Many of the poems in this book appeared in the following magazines: The Atlantic Monthly, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Controlled Burn, Poetry International, Washington Square, Fence, The San Diego Reader, The Harvard Review, and The Cider Press Review.

—for Claudia Kilbourne Lux, my daughter,

and for Stephen Dobyns, my friend

The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.

—ROBERT FROST

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the

Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.

—JOHN KEATS

Cucumber Fields Crossed by High-Tension Wires

The high-tension spires spike the sky

beneath which boys bend

to pick from prickly vines

the deep-sopped fruit, the rind's green

a green sunk

in green. They part the plants' leaves,

reach into the nest,

and pull out mother, father, fat Uncle Phil.

The smaller yellow-green children stay,

for now. The fruit goes

in baskets by the side of the row,

every thirty feet or so. By these bushels

the boys get paid, in cash,

at day's end, this summer

of the last days of the empire

that will become known as

the past, adios, then,

the ragged-edged beautiful blink.

The Man into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball

each day mowed

and mowed his lawn, his dry quarter-acre,

the machine slicing a wisp

from each blade's tip. Dust storms rose

around the roar, 6 P.M. every day,

spring, summer, fall. If he could mow

the snow he would.

On one side, his neighbors the cows

turned their backs to him

and did what they do