Solving for X - Robert B. Shaw Hollis Summers Poetry Prize

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      indoors. With skin awoken

      to June so pointedly,

      we’ll settle for one token

      of such phlebotomy.

      Midas, your fabled gleaming touch

      would be hard put to burnish much

      that ocher crop across the road —

      like some erupting mother lode,

      proliferating uncontrolled

      back to the treeline, solid gold.

      In truth, I doubt you could enhance

      one August field’s extravagance

      by any glitter you could lend.

      This is the wealth of summer’s end;

      an alchemy within the weed

      will flaunt itself to scatter seed,

      and summer, in a mood to splurge,

      will outdo any thaumaturge.

      Why, I sometimes wonder, out of all

      the spirited conceptions of my Maker,

      am I the chosen one? Reprinted ceaselessly,

      misprinted sometimes (I have had death appear

      in place of dearth, and yes, there is a difference),

      memorized by the multitude — why me?

      Something in my unmistakable rhythm

      seems to have taken readers by the ear;

      or could it be my undemanding scenery,

      dusty road pointing ahead to sunset?

      Woven snugly together with accustomed

      sentiments toward all that’s transitory . . .

      What could be simpler? By this time I might

      be sick of it myself, were I not bound

      to bless my access to eternity.

      As for the man who set my sky ablaze,

      he grew to loathe my popular appeal,

      but of course wasn’t able to disown me.

      Once I was plumper: seven lines, some good,

      didn’t survive the last slash of his pen.

      (You’d never know: he didn’t save the drafts.)

      Now I am all that keeps his name alive,

      pressed by hundreds of pages front and back.

      Saffron pyres flicker on my horizon.

      He’d have pissed on the embers if he could.

      A word was missing from his fourteenth line.

      He mused on how much easier it would be

      if one could still wedge an apostrophe

      in “over,” or if cattle still were kine,

      when he was yanked away from his design:

      his daughter’s kitten, too far up a tree,

      had to be rescued. Undelightedly

      he undertook to grapple with white pine,

      up in whose jutting plumes of needles clung

      that tiny fright incarnate and enfurred.

      He got it down. His daughter’s satisfaction

      was ample, quick, and real. His forearm stung

      with scratches, but his brain hummed with a word

      found on a high branch, fathered by distraction.

      He’s finished tacking up the Christmas garland

      so it arrays the Parish Hall at one end,

      loops of glistering tinsel off a rafter.

      Nagged by Sunday School teachers, none of whom

      could reach to do it, he brought up his ladder

      and hammered through their bicker of suggestions

      to pin the swags the way he damn well wanted.

      Under this job tomorrow an eight-year-old

      boy, a seven-year-old girl will cradle

      a large, diapered baby doll between them,

      while shepherds of the same age, some of them

      notorious brats, stand burlap-clad with canes,

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