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Patrick Barron
Patrick Barron is an assistant professor in English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He was recently awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy in Rome, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant for his translations of the work of Italian poet Andrea Zanzotto. His books include
Italian Environmental Literature: An Anthology, Circle of Teeth: 55 Poems, and the forthcoming
The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto (University of Chicago Press). He has published essays, poetry, and translations in numerous journals, including
Ecopoetics, The North Dakota Quarterly, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, MELUS, ISLE, Italica, and
Forum Italicum.
Raked
The winter-stripped branches
remind me of losses
hair raked into snarls
of wire or rough twine
heartfibers
or stretchy connective tissue
binding muscles
to bone to muscles to skin
turned stiff along the edges
most hit by rain and sun
where the passage of space
confirms time's ticking
the slow journey of the earth
around itself
around the disappearing sun
whose wake
is made of chill becoming cold air
whose fingers
tap at the friable window of my chest
poke through to the point
where the distance and direction
between pale green and ash grey
are unclear, obscured
by an uncertain shift in season.
Looking Inside
Silent
observatories
of under- above-
ground activities
that spiral zigzag
dash and creep
in cycles of cells
that seep through
the mind that
is earth that is
sky that is a
pulsating pumping
leg root branch or
stem flexed
with tension-
anticipation
the wait
that is growth
and decline
the drive
that reaches
through the world
that is perception
the soft running
of a finger
over boards
a rush
of news
of years
recorded
in the delicate-
dense
brail
of tree rings
a sense of
edges always
edges.
copyright © Patrick Barron
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