Herman Melville’s Book of Four Sentences

← v7n1, Spring 2008

The snow fence could be seen

leaving a woman who’s eating cold noodles.

It’s not made of abandoned bee boxes

or, egotistically,

like a medieval famine in Japan.

Here, the Quaker whalers

are scaling a ladder

into the idealized heavens.

A ladder

made of fresh DNA of snow fence:

these pious hunters

are screaming and waving to their children:

they sigh and say, bye-bye:

their gums

bleeding like glaciers,

like the receding hairline of acacia

on Mt. Sinai . . .

myth religion art

Norman Dubie

Norman Dubie’s newest collection of poems, Robert Schumann is Mad Again, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2019. His work, which includes books of poetry and aphorisms such as Lumen de Lumine (Paper Press Books, 2017), The Quotations of Bone (Copper Canyon Press, 2015), The Volcano (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), The Insomniac Liar of Topo (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), and Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum (Copper Canyon Press, 2004), has been translated into over thirty languages. Dubie has won the 2016 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize from POETRY , and the PEN Center USA Award for Best Poetry Collection in 2002. He has received fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Photo by Matt Valentine