Woods Are on Fire

Fleda Brown is professor emerita at the University of Delaware and is a faculty member of the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. She served as Delaware’s poet laureate from 2001 to 2007 and is the author of nine poetry books, including The Devil’s Child and Fishing With Blood, and two memoirs, including Driving with Dvöák (Nebraska, 2010). Her work has twice appeared in The Best American Poetry and has won numerous awards, including a Pushcart Prize and the Felix Pollak Prize.

Fleda Brown¿is professor emerita at the University of Delaware and is a faculty member of the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. She served as Delaware’s poet laureate from 2001 to 2007 and¿is the author of nine poetry books, including The Devil’s Child and Fishing With Blood, and two memoirs,¿including¿Driving with Dvorák (Nebraska, 2010). Her work has twice appeared in The Best American Poetry and has won numerous awards, including a Pushcart Prize and the Felix Pollak Prize.¿ ¿

Acknowledgments     Introduction by Ted Kooser     Backfires     I. from Fishing with Blood (1988) Garden     To Mark, My Retarded Brother, Who Lived 20 Years and Learned to Speak 300 Words     Arch     For Grandmother Beth     A Plain Philosophical Choice     Out Back     Canoe     Whaler     Catching Turtles     Fishing with Blood     Apalachee Bay     The Scholar’s Cat     Saving a Life     He Says How It Was     Emily Dickinson’s Love     Love, for Instance     from “O’Keeffe”     She Learns to Walk     She Learns to Talk     A New Yorker Visits Her Exhibition     She Marries the Photographer     An Expert Explains Her Work     II. from Do Not Peel the Birches (1993) Elvis at the End of History     Do Not Peel the Birches     A Long and Happy Life     Learning to Dance     After the Rain     Loon Cries     Night Swimming     My Father Takes My Retarded Brother Sailing     If I Were a Swan     Dock     A Few Lines from Rehoboth Beach     Mississippi River, near Cape Girardeau, MO      Mother of the Bride Dress     St. Paul’s and St. George’s Church, Edinburgh     Farthest North Southern Town     Burdett Palmer’s Foot     Kitty Hawk     Anhinga     Bombay Hook     III. from Breathing In, Breathing Out (2002) Fourth of July Parade, Albion, WA     Buying the King-Sized Bed     Cosmic Pitching     Somewhere     Dogs     Highway 5     The Poet Laureate Addresses the Delaware Legislature Opening Its First Session after September 11     Rumors of Changes Circulate on Penguins     Cow Falling     Spring     Leaving Lewisburg     Mary Rose Quotes James Joyce on the Cliffs at Bray     Sunday Morning     Chicken Bone     Hyperspace     Language     Chat     For the Inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton, 1997     Your Body     I Write My Mother a Poem     Einstein on Mercer Street     IV. from The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives (2004) Tillywilly Fog     I Escape with My Mother in the DeSoto     Elvis Aron and Jesse Garon     Memphis Discovers Elvis     Elvis Goes to the Army     Shaking Hands with Nixon     Sputnik, 1957     Elvis Sings Gospel     Industrial Teflon Comes into Use for Kitchen Pots and Pans     Bus Stop     The Night before Her Third Marriage, She Watches a Rerun of Elvis’s Comeback Performance     Elvis Acts as His Own Pallbearer     Mrs. Louise Welling Spots Elvis at Harding’s Market     I Visit the Twenty-Four Hour Coin-Op Church of Elvis     Elvis Reads “The Wild Swans at Coole”      from “Graceland”      Elvis’s Bedroom     Lisa Marie’s Favorite Chair     The Mirrored Stairwell     The Meditation Garden     V. from Reunion (2007) If Names Started Coming Loose     Biology Lesson     What It Was Like     Fayetteville Junior High     Knot Tying Lessons: The Slipknot     Makeup Regimen     Mouse     Trillium     Small Boys Fishing under the Bridge     Light     Ode to the Buffman Brothers     Wild Lily of the Valley     No Heron     Knot Tying Lessons: The Perfection Knot     Knife     Bladder Campion     The Death of Cleone     Poem for Our Twelfth Wedding Anniversary     Through Security     Lady’s Slipper     VI. from Loon Cry: Selected and New Michigan Poems (2010) Scavengers     Crouching     Hawsers     Wild Turkeys     Deer     Northern Pike     Chicory     VII. from No Need of Sympathy (2013) Year of the Tent Caterpillars     For, Or, Nor     Sugar, Sugar     The Purpose of Poetry     The Kayak and the Eiffel Tower     My Father and Hemingway Go Fishing     Roofers     Hare’s Breath     God, God     Dancing at Your Wedding     Child Labor     Here, in Silence, Are Eight More     Short History of Music     Big Bang     Worms     Felled Tree     Translation     Building a Cathedral     Talk Radio     Fourteen Lines     VIII. New Poems The Swan Flies Straight at Me     Elegance     Unfurl     The Undoing     News     On a Day That Bombs     Feeding the Maggots     Bees     Taxol     Cancer Support Group with Painting by Monet     Snoring     Lesson     Mute Swan     Tulips     The Elk Farm     Edward Hopper’s Automat     Silence     What Happens     Fawn     Wheel     The War     Pike     Muskrat     Tiny Fish     Every Day I Touch Things     View from Space     The Gospel Truth     Speed     Blueweed     Refrigerator     Poem for Record Players     The Sex Life of Anacondas     The Bar Mitzvah     Mummy Exhibit     Caterpillars     Getting Free     July 20, 1944     Wild     Asian Carp     Grateful     Protection     Cedar Waxwing     The Poem I Was Going to Write     Reading the Smithsonian Magazine     Surrounded by People     I Say Your Name     Five Moons     Mushrooms