Bruce Weigl is the author of fourteen poetry collections and a memoir, and his work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review and Harpers. Weigl has received awards from the American Academy of Poets, and has been the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, a Patterson Poetry Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2006, Weigl was awarded the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. His collection, Song of Napalm, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1988. He currently serves as Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities at Lorain County Community College.

The following poems are from Weigl’s 2006 collection, Declension in the Village of Chung Luong, published by Ausable Press. They are featured here with the poet’s permission.

The Stakes as Hands

The stakes that the surveyors laid to mark the boundaries
of my land still stand above the drifted snow, as if someone
outstretched a hand to strangers who may pass my house.
Another war is waiting on the line to start; so many
we will send to die, and tonight
the snow is general all through the city:
an almost vast unfolding into tundras of our loneliness.
Yet it’s only snow. The stakes are stakes, not hands that reach
to strangers who may pass my house or not.

In Love with Easeful Death

That was just now a spirit;
a flicker and then gone
into the dusk of trees at the edge of the party
I can no longer bear witness to.
In the small pond with its faux waterfall and changing
colored lights,
I feed the imported fish into boredom.
That was surely a humming bird,
flit of color and then vanished into the trees.
I don’t ask anymore what’s real, and I told no one
about the absolutely white rabbit
I watched hop through my vision at the Shawmut T-stop
in Dorchester one midnight, I told no one,
but I caught myself wondering,
and then I stopped.

This No Where

This is just a picture we live inside,
white house, black shutters
frozen snow on the roof and on the ground.
This is just a movie we imagine is our lives, silent transfers
here and there in our cars, to appointments we must keep
or else die a little in someone’s estimation; die a little in
someone’s head. That’s what I think. That’s the way I think about it,
and I am only just a little afraid of letting go
completely of knowing anything,
letting go of knowing anything at all,
so I don’t know why
we fret so over the loss of beauty, over the passing, or over the death
of beauty, but we do. We try to possess beauty with our lying eyes
and think we know what beauty is or does, and it’s a crying shame
what happens to us then.

Portal

In our hallucination, the children are instructed
in the ways of finding shelter
when the rain of our bombs comes down
on their small villages and schools. The children
can identify our planes, and
what our planes can do to them. They

sleep the sleep of weary warriors
beaten down and left for nothing in their lonely deaths
that come so slowly you would wish
your own heart empty of blood.
I watched the people gather in the street
to stop the war that is the war against ourselves,
against the children who practice finding our planes
before they’re blown up into dust
nobody sees, but that
makes a sound like the vanquished.

The First Father-Murdered Rabbit

The smell of the rabbit’s blood in the back of my father’s
chevy from more than fifty years ago
comes back to me today,
out of a tunnel of some kind
is the best I can do
to explain what I mean. The smell of the rabbit’s blood
had been inside me all along; (I am most alive
inside of words, and most safe in their aisle of fancy.)
That boy didn’t have to see the rabbit, pearl of blood
at the tip of its nose,
but he did, and he didn’t have to help skin the rabbit clean,
but he did that too, at his father’s side.
You don’t know at the time
just what it is that you’re getting yourself into;
just what doors
you may open, and then never come back.