The Folded Heart
Michael Collier
 |
Wesleyan University Press Middletown, Connecticut |
Copyright © 1989 by Michael Collier
All rights reserved
Some of the poems in this book originally appeared in Agni Review, American Poetry Review, Antaeus, Boulevard, The Missouri Review, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Raccoon, The Reaper, and TriQuarterly. “Feedback” originally appeared in The New Yorker; “The Diver”, “A Private Place,” and “Tonight” in Poetry.
I would like to thank Edward Hirsch, Garrett Hongo, William Meredith, John Murphy, Elizabeth Spires, and David St. John for their friendship and encouragement.
Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graduate School of the University of Maryland made possible many of the poems in the book.
All inquiries and permissions requests should be addressed to the Publisher, Wesleyan University Press, 110 Mt. Vernon Street, Middletown, Connecticut 06457
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Collier, Michael.
The folded heart.
(Wesleyan poetry)
I. Title. II. Series
PS3553.0474645F6 1989 811′.54 88–28090
ISBN 0-8195-2169-8
ISBN 0-8195-1171-4 (pbk.)
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition
Wesleyan Poetry
For Katherine
Contents
The Heavy Light of Shifting Stars
The Folded Heart
The Problem
Awake in the dark, I counted the planes
that hung by thumbtacks and string from the ceiling.
I brought them out of their shadows with their names:
Hellcat, Spitfire, Messerschmitt and Zero.
They were part of a problem that made death fair.
Part promise, part gamble, the problem went like this:
How old must I be before I am old enough for my father to die?
The answer was always twenty-one–
a number impossible to imagine.
It made the world fair enough for sleep.
My father didn’t die when I was twenty-one.
I didn’t blame him. He didn’t know that night after night
I had bargained his life away for sleep.
Now to calm my fear of my father’s death,
I remember the delicate plastic landing gear
of those airplanes, their sharp axles protruding
from the hard gray tires. You had to be careful
with the noxious glue. You had to put one drop
of