The Rock That is Not a Rabbit

Description

Meditative Poems That Ask, What If “We Change and Change / But Don’t Change Back?”  Change arises as something both desired and mourned in poems that reckon with a world where perspectives blur, names drift “billowing, unattached,” and language yields a broken music. A statue of Lenin topples in a Georgian square only to be raised again in a Dallas backyard. Antlers sprout from Actaeon’s head, rendering him unrecognizable to the dogs he loves. Ungainly piano notes pour from a window and wake unexpected wonder in a lost walker. A forest grows inside a box that once held a father’s new pair of shoes. Skylab slips from its watchful orbit and careens toward Earth. A familiar chair once owned by a now absent family appears in a field of wild parsnips. Meditative and richly imaginative, these poems cast and recast the self and its relation to other selves, and to memory, history, power, and the natural world.  “The otherness of the natural world shimmers into view, into consciousness, and so does the city that encroaches upon it, in Corey Marks’s bold, Stevensian, textured memories and meditations. This full-bodied book is an enlargement of experience.” —Edward Hirsch, author of The Heart of American Poetry  “What a strange and unexpected book Corey Marks has written, a book in which thinking allows the poem to approach real and genuine feeling. How gently it refreshes our perceptions of reality, reminding us of the loneliness of the imagination in an uncanny, but human-scale, poem like ‘Horse Headed Boy.’ With a deceptively plain style that branches into introspection as dense as a wood, the poet registers the consequences of silence, personal and cultural, the endless and terrifying sublime of ‘the warren / of what I hadn’t said.’ This is a meditative book, a book in which a kind of concentrated thinking can feel light as snow as it buries you with implication. It conjures up a world of American houses in which no one has the courage to say what needs to be said, American landscapes in which we go to figure out what those things are, and finally, American thresholds in which some measure of honesty might eventually be (painfully and beautifully) possible.” —Katie Peterson, author of Life in a Field  Corey Marks is the author of Renunciation, a National Poetry Series selection, and The Radio Tree, winner of the Green Rose Prize. He’s received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Natalie Ornish Prize from the Texas Institute for Letters, and the Bernard F. Conners Prize from the Paris Review. A University Distinguished Teaching Professor at University of North Texas, he directs creative writing for the Department of English. 

THE ROCK THAT IS NOT A RABBITT  

The rock that is not a rabbit suns itself  

in the field, its brown coat that isn’t fur  

furred with light. The rock that isn’t a rabbit   

would be warm to a palm but wouldn’t   

quicken or strain from touch. It doesn’t ache   

with hunger or pine with rabbit-lust,   

doesn’t breathe the world in, translating   

scent into some rabbit understanding.   

The world is beyond its understanding.   

And yet the rock that is not a rabbit will   

outlast the hawk banking above, the fox   

sloughing free of its den, the wheel nicking   

off the road to disturb the gravel berm,  

the mower coughing up the neighbor’s yard.  

Even so, its ears fold back against its body   

as if to make itself small, a secret,   

though when a breeze disorders the grass,  

the rock’s stillness appears like wild motion.