Edison Dupree

Two poems from Edison Dupree’s Miracle Soap

followed by a note on the author

Cornfield with Doves

It’s getting toward my time
to be enrolled among the legions
of the fallen pretty-good poets.
A grateful earth has patted their heads.

And here’s my head,
this failing crop of white hairs
mown to stubble;
these dry discolored lumps
half-hidden in it, recalling all those

makeshift graves in the bullet-mown
Cornfield at Antietam.
—And then came hundreds of mourning doves,
to peck at the shattered kernels; to peck
down into one bloated shape
the gravediggers missed—

their beaks were foul as vultures’
there. In that obscene place
they were too late to symbolize
peace, let alone mourn.
Those were old lies about them.

But they themselves were just an old true
story of doves flying
toward their food, in the blue air,
their slender tails pointing always
backward toward
the warm original egg.

I lived in an egg once.
I loved the soft light permeating
my shell and my sealed eyelids.
I felt the warmth of my mother’s feathers.
Or was it just the sun’s?

Soon I’ll burn in the sun’s
molten yolk, and feel nothing.
The earth will circle endlessly.
I’ll paint my side of it blue,
and space will blacken the other.

 

Edison Dupree

 

Epilogues

for Giulia Dupree

1  Her Floor

A finishing nail
has raised its head
up out of the wood,
and gone all

human and sad.
A tiny blank expression,
catching the sun,
like a match head

scraping against my giant shoe.
As if to burn it down.
As if the old woman
had known what to do.

 

2  Salvage Yard

This is the way she slumped and died,
on the vinyl seat, on Litchfield Road,
hit by a truck on the driver’s side,
at forty-five through the red light.

This is the son who wasn’t there,
was not and never had been there,
and did not kill her, is that clear?
Nor turn the wheel to save her.

 

3  Graveside

And now this white stone
tooth has nothing to grind
against but sky.
All the panicky
rage is coffined,
it’s tamped in,

deeper than I am
tall. Nothing to fear
now but the poison’s
own loneliness,
standing here,
saying its charm,

as if to defend
her now. As if her first
little red scream
when nobody came
to offer the breast
were stopped, and pardoned.

 

Edison Dupreee

 

Cornfield with Doves first appeared in Ploughshares, and Epilogues first appeared in Southern Poetry Review.

Edison Dupree’s full-length collection, Prosthesis, was the 1994 Bluestem Award volume. He has also published two chapbooks: Boy With a Ball (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019) and A Rapid Transit (North Carolina Writers’ Network, 1988). He is a native of North Carolina, but has lived for many years in Cambridge, Mass., where he recently retired from working as a university library assistant.