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The Californian
A poem by Mary Mackey
I wander
among them
with dolphins on my shirt
a visitor from a dry land
I come as
an ambassador
from rattlesnake
country
smelling of
digger pines
and the salt
of the
Pacific
I am a describer
of seals and star
thistles
of earthquakes
the late night
jolt
the run for
the door
from March to November
I tell them
we have no rain
I try to conjure
the red
dust for them
but even the air they
breathe is
green
it all comes
tumbling
down
sooner or
later
I tell them
boulders
mud
freeways
the people you
love
they all crack or burn
nothing is permanent
they listen
politely
some even take
notes
I feel like
a small stone age tribe
recently
discovered by
eager
anthropologists
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Excerpted with permission from Breaking
the Fever by Mary Mackey, published by Marsh
Hawk Press in September 2006.
The writer: Mary Mackey is a
novelist and poet and a Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence
at California State University, Sacramento, where she teaches creative
writing and film. Breaking
the Fever is her fifth book of poetry. She also is the
author of one experimental novella, Immersion,
and ten novels, including
A Grand Passion, Season
of Shadows, and The
Year the Horses Came. Her literary works have been translated
into eleven foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, Greek,
and Finnish. At present, she is co-writing film scripts with Hollywood
director Ren6e De Palma.
Visit Mary online at www.marymackey.com.
About the book: “The poetry
in Breaking the Fever offers truths both personal & political, visions
both actual and imaginatively broad. Ranging in setting from her
childhood Indianapolis to a Brazilian favela, in subject from ecological
tragedy to marital passion to the thoughts of a thoroughly contemporary
Leda, Mary Mackey's crisp-edged perceptions are set down in this
new collection of poems with a sensuous, compassionate, and utterly
unflinching eye," says poet Jane Hirshfield
Buy
the book.
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