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  • Fiber Stress at Proportional Limit
  • Mark Kraushaar (bio)

Because of some wayhe's stuffed his pants in his boots,and studies the sky I think of his home townas Flagstaff or Dodgeand that if it weren't for bad luck,born poor, fell ill, magically ambushed every timehe'd put some cash together, sure, maybe he'd be living largein Provo, you know, maybe he'd bewelding in Travis or ranching in Butte.The point is, he'd be going along somewhere,he'd be making his way somehow, but since I'm the onewaiting for the 8 bus to work, since he's the oneliving under the overpass, because theseare his crushed cans, his shredded blanket,his trampled papers, his plastic chair,and music stand shoved into his squeaky cart,because he's the one sleeping on the greasy squareof cardboard he's folded onceand jammed in with the rest of his stuff,how can I not think that of the two of us I'mthe one who's pulled it together in the world,which if this isn't quite wisdom, then it's perseverance,a kind of common sense, a certain competence,a sort of fortitude, a stick-to-it-ive-ness,that's right, and even insight—I won't go on, I don't believe it myself—but next my bus pulls up and I'mrolling down Government Aveand looking out at the parked carsand the shops, I'm watching the men and the women alltrot-trotting along and they seem, all of them, they all seemif not at their perfect, settled centers, then, anyway,near enough that they are, either way, [End Page 351] emphatically not merely hanging on,because rather, they know something,and sense something even if it they don't know they know.Mainly though they aren't hearing, are not at all hearingthis same slight splintering, and thinned boardcracking, this same cracked plankgiving slowly away. [End Page 352]

Mark Kraushaar

Mark Kraushaar's poetry collection Falling Brick Kills Local Man won the 2009 Felix Pollak Prize and was published by the University of Wisconsin Press. His most recent collection, The Uncertainty Principle, published by Waywiser Press, was chosen by James Fenton as winner of the Anthony Hecht Prize.

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