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Chard DeNiord

Chard DeNiord

Chard deNiord is the author of four books of poetry, The Double Truth (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), Night Mowing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), Sharp Golden Thorn (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003), Asleep in the Fire (University of Alabama Press, 1990) and a book of essays and interviews with seven senior American poets (Galway Kinnell, Ruth Stone, Lucille Clifton, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Jack Gilbert, Maxine Kumin) titled Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs (Marick Press, 2012). He is professor of English at Providence College and lives in Putney, Vermont with his wife Liz.

My Heart On Your Ass In The Glass

A line I'll never finish,
nor leave in ellipsis,
nor add an image to.
They are all the words—
just three—you need
to know in the glass
you gaze into like a book
that's opened to me
on you—pages one
and two; predicate first,
then "I" on the high
bare hill from which
I view the world
in a flash, both turning
and still, both spun
and held by the capital
noun I use as a verb.

Inquisition In The Kitchen Of Dorothy Day

                    ...similemente il mal seme d'Adamo

                    gittansi di quellito ad una ad una,/

                    per cenni come augel per suo richiamo.

                            

                                            —Inferno, Canto III Lines 115-117

                  The wicked seed of Adam fling

                  themselves from that shore one by one

                  at the signal, as a falcon at its recall.

                                            (Translated by John D. Sinclair)
                              

In the absence of the bone you wished away,
you feel nothing in place of where it had grown,
although you know for reasons you can't explain
that others have chosen to keep it as a 'strange
vestigial part' for feeling the pain of others.
So when you say such things as "the violence
must end, but..." you give yourself away
like the souls in Canto III of Dante's Inferno
who hurl themselves like spears to the other
side. You treat the victims as fools and laugh
at torture. Would you cook the nettle? Shop for seconds?
Quick. The water's boiling. The children are crying.

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