Our poem of the week, Richard Robbins’s “Wolf visits her dream,” appears in burntdistrict Volume 3, Issue 1. Richard Robbins has published five books of poems, most recently Radioactive City (Bellday Books, 2009) and Other Americas (Blueroad Press, 2010). He directs the creative writing program and Good Thunder Reading Series at Minnesota State University, Mankato.
WOLF VISITS HER DREAM
By Richard Robbins
years after the nasty
episode, Grandmother gone now,
the forest suffering from blight.
He would have her drink the long
glass of wine from crystal where the three
small bones of the ear lay listening.
Why couldn’t she move to another
story. Why did he do the Russian dance
until she promised to kiss.
There’s no mercy in the eight-bedroom
house he’s built next to the pond. In Timberwood
Acres, pigs are rolling out the sod.
What eyes he had, even as
she refused them. What teeth, what crooked fences
along the straight streets of dream.
She wants to move, awake, to another
story, the one where she drifts large as a red front
across the continent, sea to sea.
She wants to move to the story of red
rain falling on the blight, making the brown
trees sing, the brown birds sing.
The title is a first line by Suheir Hammad, from “break (full)”.