METAMORPHOSES OF THE SLEEPING BEAST by Dale Jacobson

Metamorphoses of the Sleeping Beast by Dale Jacobson
Introduction by Scott King
ISBN 978-1-890193-74-4; 114 pages; $12

2. (autumn)

Not the dream of water where the stars
dimly die, snuffed out by sweeping dawn-
nor the stones-nor the rocky shoreline
of weightless shadows cast upon water-

nor the autumnal reprieve of Indian Summer,
nor the great low globe of the harvest moon,
nor the crisp frost with its intricate repose
upon our windows and upon the grass,

nor autumn's martyred colors burning
furious against winter's white academies,
but perhaps the rustle of leaves breaking
apart beneath our feet like ancient letters,

or perhaps vacant lots or abandoned buildings
where absence is another power, and we
are reminded how grief pulls us together
like gravity pulls the dead into the earth.

Ours are hands washed in elegiac waters...

from 'Song of the Seasons' in Metamorphoses of the Sleeping Beast by Dale Jacobson (Red Dragonfly Press, 2008)

"Dale Jacobson is a poet of lyric praise and political vision. Like Tom McGrath, Jacobson's late friend and mentor, he comes to his topics from growing up and working in the farms and canning factories of the great prairie of the northern mid-west. If there is a politics in his poetry as there is in McGrath's, it is as spiritually suffused with nature as William Blake's, as imagistic and allusively argued as Neruda's, and as American as a coyote on a hilltop outside town waking us up with his lyrical, plaintive song." -John Balaban