Half Promised Land

By Thomas Lux

The world displayed in the poems of Thomas Lux is a fairly dangerous place, a half promised land, a region where turtles languish of thirst, where a lifebuoy crawls with spiders, where a moving car hits a moving moose and both survive, where what tends to terrify us tends also to make us feel safe, where "rattlesnakes feel at home,” where "your belief in justice/merges with your belief in dreams."

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9780544936867

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

title page

Contents

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Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

I

The Milkman and His Son

Empty Pitchforks

Night Above the Town

Sailing, Islands

The Crows of Boston and New York

The Fourth Grade

Sleepmask Dithyrambic

The Thirst of Turtles

Sleep for Bears

Somebody’s Aunt Swabbing Her Birdbath

Give It to the Wind

Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy

II

Early On, This Decade’s Light Smelled

His Job is Honest and Simple

It’s the Little Towns I Like

At the Far End of a Long Wharf

The Night So Bright a Squirrel Reads

You Go to School to Learn

If I Die Before I Wake

There Were Some Summers

His Spine Curved Just Enough

Moon-Annoyed, Cognac’s Ashen Thrill

It Must Be the Monk in Me

After a Few Whiffs of Another World

The Dark Comes On in Blocks, in Cubes

Like a Wide Anvil from the Moon the Light

Beneath the Apple Branches Bent Dumbly

III

Hospital View

The Oxymoron Sisters

Dr. Goebbels’s Novels

A Tenth of a Cent a Stitch

The Great Books of the Dead

On Resumption of the Military Draft

When I’m Gone

The Swimming Pool

Via Posthumia

Snake Lake

Wife Hits Moose

Pedestrian

IV

Triptych, Middle Panel Burning

About the Author

Connect with HMH

Copyright © 1986 by Thomas Lux

All rights reserved.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Lux, Thomas, date.

Half promised land.

I. Title.

PS3562.U87H34 1986 811'54 85-30506

ISBN 0-395-38255-6

ISBN 0-395-38256-4 (pbk.)

eISBN 978-0-544-93686-7

v2.0217

The Life by James Wright, copyright © 1968 by James Wright. Reprinted from Shall We Gather at the River by permission of Wesleyan University Press.

The poems in this volume first appeared in the following magazines: American Poetry Review: The Great Books of the Dead. Atlantic Monthly: Snake Lake. Crazy Horse: Night Above the Town, Pedestrian. Field: His Job Is Honest and Simple, Like a Wide Anvil from the Moon the Light, The Dark Comes On in Blocks, in Cubes, There Were Some Summers, Triptych, Middle Panel Burning. Ironwood: Sailing, Islands. Memphis State Review: Empty Pitchforks. Paris Review: Sleepmask Dithyrambic, Somebody’s Aunt Swabbing Her Birdbath, The Thirst of Turtles. Pequod: Early On, This Decade’s Light Smelled, If I Die Before I Wake, It Must Be the Monk in Me. Ploughshares: Hospital View, On Resumption of the Military Draft, Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy, ‘The Milkman and His Son." Poetry: After a Few Whiffs of Another World, His Spine Curved Just Enough. It’s the Little Towns I Like, The Night So Bright a Squirrel Reads. Rubicon: Dr. Goebbels’s Novels, When I’m Gone. Seneca