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Prairie Schooner 78.2 (2004) 68-69



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Two Poems

A Sad Tale

Light of a hundred lights thrown on the air,
gold, green and blue the sun can syncopate,
this was the peacock's tail, widely displayed,
my son, eighteen, and I took in this noon,
ours alone the greens of the Wales castle.
All the way to Cardiff to say nothing?

The fan tail displayed in terrible broad pomp
rose and fell and swelled, rising again, high
but never high or long or wide enough
for this king.
          Still dumb, we fell on the air,
one with it, father and son together
in the scream of the peacock male in Wales,
the beautiful male calling the female:
come out of the hedge, plain one I will praise
and make beautiful in this sad music,
I display for you and fail and still display.

Small Boy on Playground, Detroit, 1940s

Spooning down egg drop soup, my favorite,
I hear the sound of my lost childhood,
Shhhh.Shhh.Shh.Sh.S-
from an adjoining booth. And there Teach sits, [End Page 68]
dyed red hair sprayed in place, your horse jaw set
in the bit someone slid under your tongue
to break you that you break boys, their boy noise.
You have a boy beside you to work on,
your son, and while you sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-
tame him or try to with your narrative
of boys you kept "in line" today at school.

Down corridors of years your counterpart
squints back at me, the good boy told to sh
because I am a boy, banished outside
to play with girls at recess while the boys
inside copy "I will do my homework"
a hundred times.
          It's cold here in Detroit.
I press my cheek into the chain link fence
as if pressing the iron could keep back
boys who will come for me at 3:15,
as if I could have thirty fists myself
to take them on when they full-nelson me
(I won't, I won't cry when they take me down)
to beat the shit out of the one you choose
to make your scapegoat for the world of men
you hate for your own reasons, stupid bitch.
Even now, sh- and shit have the same sound.
Teach, I'm still crying, nose broken on that ground.

Peter Cooley has published six books of poetry. His most recent, A Place Made of Starlight, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2003. From 1970 to 2000 he served as Poetry Editor for North American Review.


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