Penumbra. Michael Shewmaker

“The Seven Thunders,” “The Curlew,” and “The Choice” appeared in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume IV (Texas Review Press, 2011).

      Thanks also to Stanford University, Texas Tech University, and McNeese State University for generous fellowships and grants that allowed me to complete this book.

      “The Choice” is for Aaron Kelly and Mike Wiley; “The Seven Thunders” is for Morri Creech; “The Orchard” is in memory of Virginia Shewmaker.

      For the fallen

      If in ly3t we witnesse puyr devynyte, þen shadowe herberwen our humanyte.

      —Anonymous fragment, 14th century

      Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.

      —Baudelaire, “The Albatross”

       Contents

       Doppelgänger

       One

       Winter Ghazal

       Diorama

       The Neighbors Upstairs

       The Lover

       Ink

       The Illusionist

       The Artifact

       Intersection

       Two

       The Curlew

       On a Chinese Festival Scene Carved into the Casque of a Helmeted Hornbill

       Harvest

       Crop Circles

       Automaton

       A Summer Primer

       Nocturne

       Three

       The Baptist

       The Devil in Grand Saline

       Babel

       An Apostate’s Prayer

       The Pastor’s Wife

       The Lepidopterist

       The Somnambulist

       La Llorona

       Tenebrae

       Four

       Overheard

       Digging My Father’s Grave

       The Orchard

       Auguress

       The Choice

       Horoscope for My Dying Father

       School Bus Graveyard

       Five

       The Seven Thunders

       Advent

       Destin Wedding

       The Pastor

       Übermensch

       The Mime of Thermopylae

       The Cooling Pond

       Photo Found on a Dead Man’s Phone

       The End of the Sermon

       Doppelgänger

      Who is this double goer, this familiar stranger

      following me with pockets full of moths—

      this moonlit strider, hawker who won’t pass by

      even when I pause to make a call—this changer

      of pace and posture, alley pisser with swaths

      of unrequited time?

      What does he spy

      in the limp rose on my lapel—in my unrest—

      the half-smoked cigarette, my borrowed clothes?

      Why