A Million-Dollar Bill

By Eric Paul Shaffer

A Million-Dollar Bill surveys our lives in America up close and personal from the first young summer taste in "Watermelon Seeds" to the hopeful hand-made creation of legal tender to purchase the necessities and accessories of the American Dream in the title poem.

 

Quirky, original, and astute, this expansive and engaging poetry collection by Eric Paul Shaffer entertains even as each poem presses readers to pause and think for a moment.

 

From love to death to parking the car, from rain to ice to sky to falling stars, the little insights that grow large in language are here for the reading. Best of all, with A Million-Dollar Bill, you can keep the change.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Coyote Arts
• Release date: Jan 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9781587750458

Book preview

Cover of A Million-Dollar Bill: Poems by Eric Paul Shaffer

Praise for A Million-Dollar Bill

Eric Paul Shaffer’s poems are always filled with clear light and fresh air. They restore deep attention and gratitude, a rebalancing between land and sky.

—Naomi Shihab Nye, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, 2009-2015, and author of Fuel and Transfer

The poems in A Million-Dollar Bill represent Shaffer’s thoughtful presence in the world at his (and our) big-hearted best. His poems are full stories in small frames, always sharply said, never sentimental, relentlessly true, sensuously rich, always welcoming us in.

—J.D. Whitney, author of Grandmother Says, All My Relations, and Sweeping the Broom Shorter

A Million-Dollar Bill is Eric Paul Shaffer’s most imaginative book yet! With unparalleled accuracy and clarity, Shaffer’s astute observations turn the world on its ear through your ear. Read these poems aloud and often.

—Sara Backer, author of American Fuji and Bicycle Lotus

Eric Paul Shaffer’s poems must be radically après-garde because I swear I sometimes understand every word. It’s as if Shaffer’s appointed himself defender of those corniest of literary values: clarity and precision. He writes with a naive sense of wonder and play, as if earnest communication were still possible between human beings. You’d almost have to think the man enjoys being alive.

—M. Thomas Gammarino, author of King of the Worlds, Big in Japan, and Jellyfish Dreams

A Million-Dollar Bill reached me just in time. After going without any new Shaffer poems for eleven years, I was beginning to wonder if I was going to die of thirst, reading my way across the Great American Poetry Desert. I’m okay now. Thirst quenched but hoping I don’t have to wait that long again.

—Red Pine (Bill Porter), translator of The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain and author of Zen Baggage: A Pilgrimage to China

A Million-Dollar Bill

Other Books by Eric Paul Shaffer

Poetry

Kindling: Poems from Two Poets   (Longhand Press; with James Taylor III)

RattleSnake Rider   (Longhand Press)

Portable Planet   (Leaping Dog Press)

Living at the Monastery, Working in the Kitchen   (Leaping Dog Press)

Lāhaina Noon: Nā Mele O Maui   (Leaping Dog Press)

Road Sign Suite: Across America and Again   (Obscure Publications)

Restoring Lady Liberty   (Obscure Publications)

Even Further West   (Unsolicited Press)

Green Leaves: Selected & New Poems   (Coyote Arts)

Fiction

You Are Here   (Obscure Publications)

The Felony Stick   (Leaping Dog Press)

Burn & Learn, or Memoirs of the Cenozoic Era   (Leaping Dog Press)

Criticism

How I Read Gertrude Stein by Lew Welch   (Grey Fox Press)

Title Page: A Million-Dollar Bill: Poems by Eric Paul Shaffer, Coyote Arts, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2024

A Million-Dollar Bill.

Copyright © 2016, 2024 Eric Paul Shaffer

Originally published by Grayson Books, West Hartford, Connecticut, 2016.

Second edition published by Coyote Arts, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2024.

Interior & Cover Design by Cindy Stewart

Author Photo by Melanie Van der Tuin

Second Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN

978-1-58775-044-1 (paper)

978-1-58775-045-8 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number:  2023944638

Coyote Arts LLC

PO Box 6690

Albuquerque, New Mexico 87197-6690 USA

coyote-arts.com

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Contents

Watermelon Seeds

Watermelon Seeds

13

A Telephone

14

The Printer

15

An Alchemy of Soap and Seeds and Cinders

16

The Woman I Might Have Been

18

Exploring the House Next Door When Nobody’s Home

20

Cleaning Up After the Storm

21

A Festival of Crescents

22

Fortuitous

23

The Famous Poet’s Wife

25

How I Lost My Library Card

26

The Evil Eric

27

For the Anniversary of My Death

29

For All You Touch

30

River Eye

31

A Silver Flask

Illumination

35

Among the Roots

36

McNeil, Arkansas, 1942

37

City of the Anti-Ghosts

38

Monopoly

40

The Kansas City Grand Emporium Blues

41

Should Have Seen It Coming

42

A Silver Flask

43

The Priest at Galileo’s Deathbed

44

Midnight, Snow and Stars

47

Planets, Houses, and the Night Always Above Us

48

On the Occasion of Andy’s Cancer Diagnosis

49

How to Successfully Flee the Storm

51

Hart Crane’s Borrowed Raincoat

52

Man Overboard

53

An Anatomy of the Celestial

55

The Glad Reaper

Matching Coffee Mugs

59

The Woman Who Clears the Way

60

Blessings

61

The Awk Word

62

Eating Crow

63

The Word-Swallower

64

The Lessons of Moonlight

66

The Glad Reaper

67

The