Blackbird Archive
← v10n1, Spring 2011
Poetry · Volume 10, Number 1

At the Lawrence Ranch

Cynthia Hogue

Inside the tulle of curtain

table with battered typewriter

                                    boiled by—

                                    someone—as

revenge (story’s apocryphal)

Outside the tumble of cord

                                    over stacked

wood and

            tumult of

untrammeled branch with

an arc above

            the peeling bark

Sturdy snow

pearling up on

                      mountain

                                  cliff

We have climbed the dirt road

past piñon, blue sage, to the old pine

“the tree-trunk there like a guardian

angel”—genus Seriphidium—

                                             Nowhere’s

the name of the inscrutable

            maker

                        Marker

                                    of plumed

and ribald solitude wherein

“close quarters tempers flared”

placenaturehistory
Cynthia Hogue

Cynthia Hogue is the author of nine collections of poetry, most recently In June the Labyrinth (Red Hen Press, 2017). She also has two collections of translations in collaboration with Sylvain Gallais, including Fortino Sámano : The Overflowing of the Poem (Omnidawn, 2012), from the French of poet Virginie Lalucq and philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, which won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2013. Her poetry and translations have appeared in Field , Poetry International , Two Lines , Crazyhorse , Prairie Schooner , Kestrel , and Best American Poetry 2016 , among others. She was a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in translation, and until 2017, the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University.