Fault

Title Page, Other Works by the Author, Copyright, Dedication, Acknowledgments

1 Fault 2 Also by Katharine Coles Fire Season The Golden Days of the Fourth Dimension History of the Garden The Measurable World The One Right Touch 3 RED HEN PRESS | Los Angeles, California Fault poetry O Katharine Coles 4 Fault Copyright © 2008 Katharine Coles All rights reserved No portion of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Book design by Mark E. Cull Layout assistance by Claudia Avalos Cover image: John Clerk of Eldin’s 1795 engraving of unconformities, from James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth Courtesy of Rare Books Division Special Collections J. Willard Marriott Library University of Utah ISBN: 978-1-59709-390-3 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008928467 The California Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts partially support Red Hen Press. Red Hen Press www.redhen.org First Edition 5 For my brothers, Jeffrey and Peter Coles— luck, and the good eye to see it when it comes. 6 Acknowledgments Grateful acknowledgement to the following journals in which these poems have appeared: Antioch Review: “Anthropomorphism”; Ascent: “The Anatomist”; “Anatomical Theater,” “Fault,” “Kepler’s Paradoxes,” “Middle Ages”; Barrow Street: “On the Beagle”; The Colorado Review: “The Practice of Hunger,” “Good Eye”; The Paris Review: “Unproved Pantoum,” “Lines Taken From a Poem on Luck, Unwritten,” “The Botanical Gardens”; Petroglyph: “Marriage: The Wheel,” “Canyon Ghazal”; Poetry: “A Confusion,” “The Double Leash”; A Smartish Pace: “Hotel Orologio,” “The Numbers”; Western Humanities Review: “Marriage: Ghazal,” “Outside Newton’s House,” “The Salt City”; and to the following anthologies: Girl’s Best Friend: “A Confusion” (reprint); Ravishing Disunities: “Marriage: Ghazal” (reprint), “Canyon Ghazal” (reprint). “The Numbers” appears as part of a permanent installation by visual artist Anna Campbell Bliss in the Leroy Cowles Mathematics Building on the University of Utah Campus. “A Confusion,” “The Double Leash,” “Fault,” “Marriage: Ghazal,” and “Middle Ages” appeared in Natural Histories, part of an ongoing collaboration with visual artist Maureen O’Hara Ure that resulted in an installation of words and images in the Salt Lake Art Center in 1998. “Lament” was first published by the Galleria Venezia Viva, Venice, in a limited edition artist’s book, Lament, with original collages by Bruno Blenner. “After Fever” was set for voice and orchestra by composer Steve Roens, and premiered in February 2008 as part of his Specific Gravity, a larger setting of poems by the author. “Accidental,” “Picking Blackberries,” “The Double Leash,” “After Fever,” “The Anatomist,” “Canyon Ghazal,” and “Poetry and Spirituality” were originally written for the anthology A Year In Place, edited by W. Scott Olsen and Brett Lott and published by the University of Utah Press. The author is grateful for the support of the University of Utah Faculty Research Committee, which provided the generous travel grant that resulted in “Good Eye,” in “Kepler’s Paradoxes,” and in the poems in the Alchemy sequence. Last and most, she is grateful to friends and others who took the time to read and comment on this manuscript and individual poems in it, especially David Baker, Karen Brennan, Kenneth Brewer, Kevin Cantwell, Michael Collier, Richard Howard, Scott Olsen, Peggy Shumaker and Melanie Rae Thon. ...