W.D. SnodgrassLeavings
Foolish, frugal Mrs. Mousie, why would you accept our generous offer, why trust our least word ever, why take these green crumbs from our bait trays bit by bit and bite by bite for a safe deposit here in our Romanian black clay vase of things already too good to be true? How long were you abuilding, how long since, this unnumbered Swiss account, your private smack stash, closed portfolio of Nourishment and Security, of Sound Ideas for an Easy Mind? Poor pirate! With no chart or map's X we've stumbled onto your best treasure. No trace of you, though, or your pink nurslings; our fierce thirsts drove you back out into fields whose hungers you'd already fled, where if you became some fox or coyote's scrap of protein, you can pass on this Pharaoh's curse-- our taint still seeping through the territory.
W. D. Snodgrass is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (1995); Each in His Season (1993); After Experience (1968); and Heart's Needle (1959), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His honors include an Ingram Merrill Foundation award and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in upstate New York.
