For a Friend in the Hospital, and: Arrival at the Cabin, and: Hornets' Nest, and: Returning to Cuttyhunk, and: Poem, and: Butterflies, and: The Peacock Flounder: (The Boston Aquarium)

THE TOM McAFEE DISCOVERY FEATURE Jeffrey Harrison Jeffrey Harrison is our fourth Tom McAfee Discovery Feature poet. He is currently a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, The New Republic, The Hudson Review, and elsewhere. The Tom McAfee Discovery Feature is a continuing series to showcase the work of an outstanding young poet who has not yet published a book. The prize is funded by the family and friends of Tom McAfee. FOR A FRIEND IN THE HOSPITAL / Jeffrey Harrison On the way to visit you the other day, I passed a colony of dandelions bunched up against the corner of a building, and I knew you would have seen them as persecuted weeds, exiled from the field, huddled together under that brick wall. I love the idea of flowers "escaping from cultivation," as the field guides say, and becoming wild again, but these had come together to create their own garden in the hard clay. And I knew you would have loved them for that and picked one, perhaps, drinking the sour milk through the straw of its green stem. The Missouri Review · 67 ARRIVAL AT THE CABIN / Jeffrey Harrison After ten miles on a dusty road, the driveway is a kind of carwash: a strip of tall grass in the middle brushes underneath, the dense ferns, leaning inward, wipe the sides, and a low spruce branch scrapes along the roof, squeaking a little. The smell of ferns, pine and mint gives way, when we open the cabin door, to mothballs. We clean up, put out the Indian rugs, take down the poles that hold the roof up under winter snows. By that time it's dark and we decide to go swimming. It's the Fourth of July. No fireworks, just a little lightning—silent, but it lights up the whole lake for eerie, trembling moments as bright as day but a cold blue. Your body is white, knee-deep in the black water, the bubbles phosphorescent when you dive. 68 · The Missouri Review HORNETS' NEST / Jeffrey Harrison I looked up and there it was, like the lightbulb of an idea: a hornets' nest under the eaves, about the size of an onion. And it grew like an onion, too, in papery layers, each day a little bigger, till it hung like a thousand-year-old paper lantern, parched and charred by time— and gray, like a brain. I thought of the combs inside, the tiers of hexagonal cells (a pattern infinitely extendable) in which the larvae germinate like seeds, or like ideas, until the nest is bristling with hornets, black and yellow striped and buzzing like electrical sparks. The Missouri Review · 69 RETURNING TO CUTTYHUNK / Jeffrey Harrison I've heard half a dozen meanings for the name and none of them alike. To me it always seemed a baby's nickname for a baby island: a low, scruffy hill on the horizon, so small it looks as if the windmill on it might lift it off the ocean like a seaplane. That day the Sunday Globe said it meant "Go away," and I believed it. I thought they must have turned the windmill on like an electric fan, a wind-machine that blew the whitecaps off the green reptilian waves, into our faces. We gave up and tacked into Sakonnet. After the storm blew over, we tried again. We spotted Cuttyhunk. At first the cliffs of Gayhead looked like part of it. The windmill stood there in the middle, without waving its arms, and stared at us inscrutably. The Gosnold monument was over to the right, like a lonely chess rook in its corner waiting for the most strategic moment to castle with the windmill-king. The harbor on the other side looked like a plate full of hors d'oeuvres, bristling with toothpicks. Then we saw the gray, Monopoly-sized houses. When we sailed past tiny, treeless Penikese (a former leper colony and now a bird sanctuary), the waves were so smooth— more like a lake's than an ocean's—it was as if the thinnest film of mist was on them, softening the blues...