Trace. Eric Pankey

      Table of Contents

       Also by Eric Pankey

       Title Page

       Dedication

       I.

       The Sacrifice

       A Bird Loose in the House

       The Place of Skulls

       Prayer

       Edge of Things

       The Calling of the Elect to Heaven

       Ritual

       The Truth of Scripture

       The Creation of Adam

       As of Yet

       Works and Days

       Primitive Water

       Models of Paradise

       II.

       The Burning House

       Moon Phases Carved on a Bone

       Southern Elegy

       Cogitatio Mortis

       Out-of-the-Body

       The Repeated Image

       A Stone to Place on a Cairn

       Archaic Reverie

       Trace

       Objects and Mementos

       A Line Made by Walking

       The Passing Moment

       The Last Word

       III.

       Cold Mountain Meditations

       Bluffs Above the Missouri

       The Dead Go Down to the Stygian Waters

       Waking Hungover in a Field, 1979

       Diptych with Fox and Hawk

       Throne of the Ancestors

       The House We Left Behind

       Six Cast Hexagrams

       Anhedonia

       Distances

       To Dwell in Thought

       Sober Then Drunk Again

       Acknowledgments

       Copyright Page

      Also by Eric Pankey

      The Pear as One Example: New and Selected Poems 1984–2008 Reliquaries Oracle Figures Cenotaph The Late Romances Apocrypha Heartwood For the New Year

       for Clare and Rob

       There ain’t no dark till something shines

      — Townes Van Zandt

       I.

       The Sacrifice

      Gradually, the blood drains:

      A thousand words never meant for scripture.

      Still hunkered on the mountain ridge,

      The moon: a saline ghost, a mouth

      Opened around a hollow syllable.

      When we move toward the sacrifice,

      God lifts as a swarm — a body of flies —

      As sated as God ever is.

       A Bird Loose in the House

      The frame — a grid — contrives a theater,

      A shadow-play alive on a curtain alive with wind.

      Call the bird

      The arbitrary inventoried in its variety,

      Or