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808 Kathleen Driskell “Old Woman Looks out Window” A young poet who is beginning to make a name for herself as a writer, a teacher, and a promoter of writers and writing is Kathleen Driskell, a professor of English at Spalding University in Louisville and a founder of the Kentucky Writers’ Coalition. She has published a number of poems in literary journals and has edited Kentucky Writer’s Directory (1999) and Place Gives Rise to Spirit (2001). The poem below appeared in the fall 1990 issue of Kentucky Poetry Review, which was dedicated to the North Carolina author Fred Chappell, under whom Driskell studied at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. h Rosebushes webbed with silkworm nests remind me of the cauliflower stumps left after I could not keep the crows away. My snap beans are sure to be thick with weeds, caterpillars eating up the vines. I’m glad I can’t see it now. For two days, there has been a fly in my water glass. I had to hide it well. I want to call the nurse, ask her to pick it out and lay it on the sill to dry. I want to know if the sun will give back its life or shrivel it like a raisin, but she will not do that for me. It would not be clean. She wants to keep dirt and earth away from me and she tells my doctor not to let me go home. He does not know how much she hates the rough look of my hands, how she uses a sharp tool to twist the black from under my fingernails. I study her motion, but turn deaf to her talking. I know she would be worthless turning a spade. Her pale skin would blister in one summer noon. ...

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