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Woodland Pattern™    Book   Center Poetry Archive		Juliet Patterson Juliet Patterson's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Letters &, Commentary, Bellingham Review, Bloom, Conduit, New Orleans Review, Washington Square, Verse and other magazines. Her first book, The Truant Lover, was selected by Jean Valentine as the 2004 winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and was published in March. She lives near the west bank of the Mississippi in Minneapolis.

Palinode Juliet Patterson

i. In the weeding eye, it can rain. Sleep. Yes, comes a measure marked Spring, between river & Sound, in the speed-up to spare the number of lakes in Wisconsin: mallards flying in the expansion of a singular disturbance flying nowhere. Our words stuttering down a ball- point pen where it snows & no one can see how at home I am with my white shoulders. I built my house to my desire shaving the outer surface of its urge to wince, kissing the ache from my lips that were before winging my hands tick-tack little wind strips, without reading, without speaking. ii. Here's the underwater sneak rout I found through Bull sluice, my heart of whip-stitch & trest, muddy runnels. Fire on the other side. The eye-white, sky of river kissed. Maybe another way of saying, I built my house to my desire. Pines above the shingles. Star-like, flame, my hands & the river sluice hinging an open door or bed. Simply the river quicker than rock, a house & the old cracked boat -hulk, trees where I pass till a star shows its gone when it snows. Eye & knocking heart can bless the hulk dragging estuary. The tree-line giving way to only motion, only speech.

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