The Folded Heart - Michael Collier Wesleyan Poetry Series

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       The Folded Heart

       Michael Collier

Wesleyan University Press Middletown, Connecticut

      Copyright © 1989 by Michael Collier

      All rights reserved

      Some of the poems in this book originally appeared in Agni Review, American Poetry Review, Antaeus, Boulevard, The Missouri Review, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Raccoon, The Reaper, and TriQuarterly. “Feedback” originally appeared in The New Yorker; “The Diver”, “A Private Place,” and “Tonight” in Poetry.

      I would like to thank Edward Hirsch, Garrett Hongo, William Meredith, John Murphy, Elizabeth Spires, and David St. John for their friendship and encouragement.

      Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graduate School of the University of Maryland made possible many of the poems in the book.

      All inquiries and permissions requests should be addressed to the Publisher, Wesleyan University Press, 110 Mt. Vernon Street, Middletown, Connecticut 06457

       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Collier, Michael.

      The folded heart.

      (Wesleyan poetry)

      I. Title. II. Series

      PS3553.0474645F6 1989 811′.54 88–28090

      ISBN 0-8195-2169-8

      ISBN 0-8195-1171-4 (pbk.)

      Manufactured in the United States of America

       First Edition

      Wesleyan Poetry

       For Katherine

       Contents

       The Problem

      1 Skimming

       V-8

       Iodine

       The Pageant

       A Private Place

       Lagoon

       The Brothers

       Feedback

      2 North Corridor

       Burial

       Air Guitar

       Practicing Stalls

       Tonight

       The Grandmothers

       Winter, 1959

       The Heavy Light of Shifting Stars

      3 Spider Tumor

       The Lights

       The Fight

       Treatment

       Territory

       The Diver

       Night Swimming

       Naushon Island

       Encanto Park, 1961

       The Cave

       The Folded Heart

       The Problem

      Awake in the dark, I counted the planes

      that hung by thumbtacks and string from the ceiling.

      I brought them out of their shadows with their names:

      Hellcat, Spitfire, Messerschmitt and Zero.

      They were part of a problem that made death fair.

      Part promise, part gamble, the problem went like this:

      How old must I be before I am old enough for my father to die?

      The answer was always twenty-one–

      a number impossible to imagine.

      It made the world fair enough for sleep.

      My father didn’t die when I was twenty-one.

      I didn’t blame him. He didn’t know that night after night

      I had bargained his life away for sleep.

      Now to calm my fear of my father’s death,

      I remember the delicate plastic landing gear

      of those airplanes, their sharp axles protruding

      from the hard gray tires. You had to be careful

      with the noxious glue. You had to put one drop

      of

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