James Tate
Damaged Stopper with Marigold

The Woman I love is a forest of enormous whispers

and her tongue smooths the petals after rain.

Her finger dreams of a garden and it is Spring.

A fast car lathers the mist like milk beneath a breast.

The puppy sleeps on top of a pink dress drooling

and a man said Think about cooking honey

delicious sausage beautiful luscious eggs please,

essential shadows drunk as diamonds in a sweet storm.

I take my cry and sing delicate girl what about this thing.

Can I leave the gift with you, swim

through peach and fiddle, chant and shine?

 
Found In Volume 25, No. 02
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James Tate
About the Author

James Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1943. His first book, The Lost Pilot, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1967. Tate wrote nineteen books and won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the Wallace Stevens Award. He served as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Tate lived in Pelham, Massachusetts, and taught for years at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.