Forrest Gander

Where a man loves a woman there is an island
of broken horses, stranded wheelbarrows
listing with cement. Morning is a flat blaze.
She boils water. Nervous hands.
Early, the husband steps out
on the false porch. Clouds rise.
The nail of sun, it will hold.
She goes in and out shaking
damp rags. He hears her in the cabinets.
On the warm splintering steps
the man hunkers: their breach, this field.
Two Clydesdales are fucking
like the carcass of an Oldsmobile
piled on another. Next to the fence
a rock works its way out of dirt.
The black bar in the gold circle
of the goat’s eye
shifts. The path stinks, musty as a snake.
Markings red and brown, and of good size.

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Also from Forrest Gander in Phoebe 13.1&2, “distractions from the real world”

Forrest Gander, a writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, was born in the Mojave Desert and grew up in Virginia. Among his most recent books are the novel The Trace, the poems Eiko & Koma, and two anthologies: Panic Cure: Poetry from Spain for the 21st Century and Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America. Gander’s book Core Samples from the World, a meditation on the ways we are revised and translated in encounters with the foreign, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He’s the A.K. Seaver Professor of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University.