What Enters, What Alters

Nance Van Winckel Click to read more...

Nance Van Winckel's fifth collection of poems, No Starling, is out from U. of Washington Press. She is the recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships and awards from the Poetry Soceity of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. New poems appear in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Crazyhorse, Field, and Gettysburg Review. A new collection of poems will appear in 2013 from U. of Washington Press. She is also the author of three collections of short fiction and teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Many men moving, trying to get something
out of the lake. Bending. Pulling.
From a raft with yellow crime tape
around it. I have to stop dancing
to look. I have to find the binoculars,
and turn off the music to hone in.
The silver offering plate of the lake stops
spinning. What hovers at the hooks’ ends?
Tooth by tooth, scar by scar, what who
will stick to which name? Or won’t?
That on and on of the not germane?
The men kneel. They yank and tug.
What arrives to eradicate the kingdom?
What enters the eye of always?

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