Pamela Alexander

LONG AFTER HE IS GONE | LAST OFFER
September 25, 2017 Alexander Pamela

LONG AFTER HE IS GONE

 

All the summer’s night
I dream I am awake reading,
following sentences that follow
a woman who finds her husband
by following his footsteps
in snow. She needs
to forgive him, to be
forgiven. When I wake

the street beyond my window
is white and banked
with sunlight.

 

 

LAST OFFER

 

I’m the top of the food chain.  I eat
ice cream and the cow it came from.

I eat trees.  I eat fertilizer that makes bad
dirt good.  I eat badgers and big cats

and wolves.  I eat moths
and frogs and the herons that eat them.

What’s an ouzel?  Is that a joke?
Give me a chance here—I can

make you very comfortable.
C’mon, drink this river.  It’s free.

Pamela Alexander is the author of four collections of poems: Navigable Waterways,a Yale Younger Poet selection; Commonwealth of Wings (Wesleyan University Press), Inland (an Iowa Poetry Prize winner), and Slow Fire (Ausable Press). After teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for many years, she joined the faculty of Oberlin College, where she is an associate editor of Field magazine.