Delicate Bait

Note

Note The quote at the beginning of “Wire Fences” comes from Dry Stone Walls by Lawrence Garner. Acknowledgments The author would like to thank the editors of the following journals where the poems indicated, or early versions of them, were first published: Arts Indiana: “At the Mall, Late,” “Why We’re Here”; Big Muddy: “Naming the Grasses,” “Repairman”; Breeze: “Local Habitation”; The Cortland Review: “Love Song, in Phoebe,” “The Way Two Horses Stand”; Crazyhorse: “Delicate Bait,” “Museum of Local History”; Denver Quarterly: “Free Fall,” “The Place We Came Ashore”; The Eleventh Muse: “Thrown Back Light”; The Evansville Review: “Reading the Latest History of the Bomb,” “Repairman”; Farmers’ Market: “Venice, 1979”; Green Mountains Review: “No Distance”; Hayden’s Ferry Review: “Retirements in the Neighborhood”; Kentucky Poetry Review: “Glancing out the Window”; Laurel Review: “Free Coaster,” “Reasonable Conversation”; The MacGuffin: “The Table”; North American Review: “Motels”; North Dakota Quarterly: “There We Are”; Oberon: “Outside of Town”; The Ohio Review: “Crystal of Gloom,” “Gully”; Ploughshares: “Listening”; Poetry: “The Fox”; Poetry East: “Go Ahead”; Poetry Northwest: “For Instance,” “Truth of the Matter”; PoetsUSA.com: “An Afternoon’s Walk”; Rhino: “Man Walking Home with a Stick”; River City Review: “To Molly on Her Sixteenth Birthday”; Spoon River Poetry Review: “Aunt El,” “Bad Sit,” “Farmers,” “Now and a Pile of Sticks”; Sycamore Review: “Strange Bloom”; Talking River Review: “Clearing in the West”; Tar River Poetry: “Alone in the House,” “Destin,” “For a Christening in Innishannon,” “These Days”; Threepenny Review, “The Meadow.” Thanks to the Chester H. Jones Foundation for giving a prize to “Why We’re Here” and to The MacGuffin for giving one to “The Table.” Many of these poems were started, polished, or completed during several residencies at the Ragdale art colony in northern Illinois. My continuing gratitude goes to the board and staff of that organization. “Wind From the South” first appeared in A Linen Weave of Bloomington Poets, ed. Jenny Kander (Lexington, Ky.: Wind, 2002). ...