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The following poems are from a newer collection titled "The Descent" which was published by Graywolf Press in the fall of 2004

DONE FOR

I did not mean to go so far, to take you
Into my mouth that night on the kitchen floor.
Once the dog tastes blood it is over. To

Impossible, undone by each tremor,
Struggle, the new small twinge at the back
Of the throat. Limbs ache with what

Cannot stop, places torn open with
Each magnificent rise and fall of the world,
Which is no longer about the plenty

Or the way home, having come down
To only this. She is ruined; she
Who once slept at her master’Äôs knee, now the hunted,

Standing in the middle of a field, stunned
By what she holds so delicately in her mouth.

THE TOOTH

No longer simple, if ever was. The coyote lies at the edge
Of the lake. I meant this, I did not; the death I paid for

Has come: a bad job of it, her jaw blown off, her underside
Gone, legs strung up with bailing twine, the body dragged

And quickly buried under leaves. When you pray, when you
Try to pray, words do not correspond in this crowded light,

They become slippery, wrong, not what I meant at all.
My knees sink in the muck, gut-blood and fur

Thicker than imagined, and out of the red wilderness   
Of bone and tongue, one lone tooth more clean and white

Than God ever could be. No longer the heart
To take what I came for: the tooth so oddly rising

Out of a midst where the living cling
For whatever they can build of her until there is no trace.

WHERE WE CROSS

How strange to believe in air
Large enough for us all.

No comfort, the thing we live.
The undersong of blood and so much on the mind

Does not know where to go.
If I climb back into what happened,

I might meet you and hold out
What I can toward the eventual,

For we did begin from the one ground,
From where our mothers still watch. What I wish

Is to breathe into your mouth a space
For all this difficult bending, as if

It were beauty, as if it were the only place
Left for those who tried so hard

To hold us apart that we came together.

from a cycle of 9/11 poems?_
(also appearing with 'Poets & Writers','Arts Respond to 9/11', 'Poets USA' and 'nycBigCityLit.com')

Sophie Cabot Black
Biography - Poems & Ordering
Readings & Appearances - Reviews - New Work

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