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THE CRADLE OF THE REAL LIFE (2000)
For a Woman Dead at Thirty (2)
Index of Titles and First Lines
Acknowledgments
The following sections of this volume were previously published as books.
Dream Barker. Copyright © 1965 by Yale University Press. Reprinted with the permission of Yale University Press.
Pilgrims. Copyright © 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969 by Jean Valentine. First published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1969.
Ordinary Things. Copyright © 1972, 1973, 1974 by Jean Valentine. First published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1974.
The Messenger. Copyright © 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979 by Jean Valentine. First published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1979.
Home.Deep.Blue. Copyright © 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 by Jean Valentine. Reprinted with the permission of Alice James Books.
The River at Wolf. Copyright © 1992 by Jean Valentine. Reprinted with the permission of Alice James Books.
Growing Darkness, Growing Light. Copyright © 1997 by Jean Valentine. First published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 1997.
The Cradle of the Real Life. Copyright © 2000 by Jean Valentine.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following periodicals in which the poems in Door in the Mountain first appeared: American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Boston Book Review, <canwehaveourballback.com>, Hayden's Ferry, Heliotrope, Kestrel, Luna, Massachusetts Review, The New Yorker (“Sheep,” “My old body,” “One Foot in the Dark”); Ohio Review, Persephone, Poetry Ireland, Two Rivers, U.S. I Worksheets, van Gogh's Ear, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Washington Square Review.
Also to the following anthologies: Best American Poems 2002, Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard, The Book of Irish American Poetry, Hammer and Blaze, and Poetry After 9/11.
To the editors, and to Dorland Mountain, The MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo, my deep thanks.
New Poems
Annunciation
I saw my soul become flesh breaking open
the linseed oil breaking over the paper
running down pouring
no one to catch it my life breaking open
no one to contain it my
pelvis thinning out into God
*
In our child house
In our child house
our mother read to us:
England:
there the little
English boy would love us under
neath a tree:
not kill us:
that was white space only like her childhood like her father her sorrow
Nine
Your hand on my knee
I couldn't move
The heat felt good
I couldn't move
The shutmouth mother goes down the stairs
and drinks warm whiskey
she always goes
and drinks warm whiskey
down in the corner: Hand-
me-down: