The Coal Life: Poems

Contents

Contents Prologue and Return 3 Red Mountains 4 Burying the Dead 5 The Baptist Steeple 6 Threat of Spring 7 Tracks 8 Path 10 I Wake to Find I Am Not Awake 11 The Cleaving 12 Return to Steinhatchee 13 Ashes and Dust 15 Almost Clean 16 Worm Grunters 17 Darwin Dreams of the Second Coming 18 Toilet Flowers 19 Magritte’s Daemon 21 Wild Kingdom 22 Hamlet beside the Stream 24 Coaxing the Coal Back to Life 25 Overburden 26 On Speaking with an Old Schoolmate after His Physics Lecture at a Local University 27 Elegy for Jessica Hayden 29 Offerings 30 Mine Rats 31 Eden’s Oranges 33 After Bloody Mary’s Death 34 Back Door 36 Reclamation 37 Tulips and Pigs 38 The Other Woman 40 Charter 41 Gauguin’s Bed 42 Mountain of Fire 43 “La mar es una puta” 44 Floundering 45 On Reading Huckleberry Finn 47 Stake Horse 48 The Mule 50 Grabbing 52 Methane 53 Some Like It Hot 55 Mayflies 56 Take Over 58 Brick Hammer and Broken Watch 59 The Motel Room 62 Mantrip 63 The Old Salt’s Brag 64 Worms: Georg Cantor, From Halle Sanatorium, 1884 66 Epilogue and Return 67 x The Coal Life ...