Two
poems from Leigh Anne Couch's Houses Fly Away
followed
by a note on the author
Obsolescence
Precious
is the crackslam of metal buttons in the dryer.
Families race room to room when telephone sings.
Bookshelves turn to wallpaper and we cherish the spines
standing at attention in their tidy jackets.
Through oneway preprogrammed interactions, we've fallen
in collusion with things and marvel at their loyalty,
their wroughtiron faith in us. In the archdiocese of spoons
there are no sinners and saints are a quaint but outdated technology.
The wireless kingdom has come to install the earthly throne
of God; morning birdsong, the serpent's sigh, are hereby
preempted by the militant hmmm and murrr, herds
of zip drives and other everlasting denizens of the new
paradise. Onward current flowing, Eden never sleeps.
We are the gardeners who might have been the garden.
Minor
Season
From
the creekbed widow
she gathers patience
misshapen stones to keep hands busy
a moon a face a
mouth
scratched then cut
one stone into the other
taking hours or years of steady motion
the clock's faithfulness unspoken
love in the backwoods
out of dead leaves and roots dusk
crawls for the sky ink on orange linen
days of pistachios, clementines, blue-bottled gin
come back her life's calling
called again and again
the refrigerator gnaws through morning
to noon hunched and scribbling at the desk
she's beginning to feel something light
but not weightless
semi-transparent one of no one
a mouth a face a
moon a circle encircled
fixed in a blackberry winter
©
Leigh Anne Couch was born in Atlanta, Georgia,
in 1968, and was educated at the University of the South and
at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she
took her BA(Hons) and MFA, respectively. She
is Managing Editor of The Sewanee Review. Her
poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The
Greensboro Review, Whiskey Island Magazine, Many
Mountains Moving, Crab Orchard Review, Slope,
Blackbird, Painted Bride Quarterly, Nimrod,
The North American Review, Cimarron Review, The
Eleventh Muse, The Cincinnati Review, Carolina
Quarterly, Seattle Review, The Distillery,
The Bark, Asheville Poetry Review, The Seattle
Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Verse Daily,
Shenandoah, 32 Poems, Southern Poetry Review,
and Sewanee Theological Review. Leigh
Anne was a semi-finalist in the Walt Whitman Prize (2003) and
the Poetry West Chapbook Contest (2004), and she was a finalist
in the Black Warrior Review Contest (2003), the Weldon
Kees Award (2003), the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize (2004),
and the Poetry West Chapbook Contest (2005). Her poem "Ciphers"
was placed second in the Lois Beebe Hayna Award for the best
poem published in The Eleventh Muse (2006).
"Obsolescence"
first appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, and "Minor
Season" first appeared in Southern Poetry Review.
