Poetry of Deborah Meadows > Woodland Pattern Book Center

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Deborah Meadows

teaches in the Liberal Studies department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona where she has been part of ongoing exchanges of writers and scholars to and from Havana. Recent works include a Tinfish chapbook, The 60s and 70s: from The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick and a book-length collection of her poetry, Representing Absence forthcoming from Green Integer.

The poem below is from Deborah Meadows' The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick a long serial poem. This chapter (forthcoming in Living Forge magazine, Buffalo, NY) and others forthcoming form Krupskaya Press as Itinerant Men.

Chapter 114

Deborah Meadows

When certain filigrees smooth
our canoe with filiations
or fill our hold with hidden bodies
tears are rovers' barracoes.

Soothing scenes, temporary effects

make orphan, phantom limb, nation

possessed of sinister

pain, an apparition of extremities,

branches of horror tree.

Nor may mast or caste form
one seamless mood however

temporal, so that ever-theoretical

our mingled threads, our mothers
die, fathers disappear, our weary
fail at progress in neighborhoods'

norms, dreary as faith

in worms, ousted facts, teeth-tiered

variables—faith: our surface.

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