Red Clay Weather

Contents

—v Foreword by Robert Philen ix  I Days like Survival 3 By the Entrance to Cordova Mall, I Sat Down and Wept 4 And Therefore I Have Sailed the Seas and Come 5 As If from the Dead 6 Attempted Birdcage Number Three 7 To Be Free 8 The New Life 9 Direction of Fall 10 My Mother Was No White Dove 11 E Lucevan le Stelle 12 Experiment V 14 In the Badlands 15 Water Is a Museum 16 Doppelganger Music 18 A Shoulder to the Wheel 20 In Bloom 22 Along with Whatever Has Not Yet Been Named 23 To Summon Up a Son 24 Given Distance, 25 What Nature Doesn’t Show 27 Wrote for Luck 28 My Mother Dated Otis Redding 30 Flying 31 Falling 33 Some Dreams He Forgot 35 Contents shepherd text-2.indd 5 11/22/10 2:07 PM —vi  II Dead Boys Club 43 My Father by the Sea, Supposedly 45 A Little Iliad 46 Scraps of an Achilles 48 On Heroes and Hero Worship 49 Play Dead 50 My Immortal 51 Somewhere Off the Coast of Cyprus 53 The New Gods 54 If Orpheus Were Honest with Her 55 Silent Film, Sound of Glass 56 Modernism 57 And This She Knows 58 A Man Named Property 60 Natural Selection 62 Once Thought to Have Been Destroyed 63 The Shallows 64 What It Is to Burn 66 I’ve Known the Garden 67 Next Year in Gomorrah 68 A Parking Lot Just Outside the Ruins of Babylon 71 Alongside the Desiring Machines 72 Approximately Nothing 73 Kings Go Forth 74 Seize the Day 75 September Songs 77 Song of the Yet-to-Be-Decided 79 shepherd text-2.indd 6 11/22/10 2:07 PM —vii Soon 80 Narcissus Before the Rain 81 Lincoln Park Apocrypha 82 “God-With-Us” 84 Acknowledgments 87 shepherd text-2.indd 7 11/22/10 2:07 PM shepherd text-2.indd 8 11/22/10 2:07 PM ...