Poetry
Partridge, Dixie
Dixie Partridge November Turning (for my mother at 70) The thin language of air thickens intangibly as night rises from the ground at my feet.... We know the white sleep, the slurred speech...
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...The dry thistle of land in disuse will crackle rumors until the first muffling snow...
...We know the white sleep, the slurred speech of cold, needletips of hoarfrost on the wire fence...
...Something in the coming cold has turned the light toward you, and I see your dark hair I combed once in the dusk when you were injured by a runaway team...
...A winter wind will rise through this written landscape, landlocked cottonwoods will sound like surf, or like traffic become permanent through our nights since condemned easements set the highway through the farm...
...Years from the land and I am moved again by season and a future of memory: your limp deeper, dragging...
...this blue pollen recurring on hills the moments before nightfall— a presence of things that come without a ripple...
...Is this my life or yours...
...graying hair more and more uncurled...
Vol. 121 • November 1994 • No. 20
