USA

Reginald Shepherd is the editor of "The Iowa Anthology of New  American Poetries "(University of Iowa Press, 2004). He is the  author of five volumes of poetry, all published by the University  of Pittsburgh Press: "Fata Morgana" (2007), "Otherhood" (2003), a  finalist for the 2004 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, "Wrong" (1999)"Angel, Interrupted" (1996), and "Some Are Drowning" (1994) winner of  the 1993 Associated Writing Programs' Award in Poetry. His poetry  has appeared in four editions of "The Best American Poetry", as well  as in such journals as The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New York  Times Book Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Yale Review. It  has also been widely anthologized. His collection of literary  essays, "Orpheus in the Bronx", will be published in the University  of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry Series in 2008. Shepherd is the  recipient of the 1993 "Discovery"/The Nation Award and of grants  from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts  Council, and the Florida Arts Council, among other awards and  honors. Shepherd lives with his partner in Pensacola, Florida.  http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com. 

I’ve Known the Garden 

The earth is an inventory of bones, the fossils sing,
thick with mud-headed myth, an unclassified
species of shadow: the crumbling architecture
of half-surveyed pasts beckons like a heat mirage 

across the glacier-scarred desert, full of glare
and false outlines, canyon-blind, all
weatherless. Pieces of summer
come apart in my hands and I call it

prehistory, sea-shaped rocks
swim in my palm. I call it stratigraphy,
a place of blank road signs
pointing in all directions. I talked them out

of memory, let their stone flags sleep
amid the sediments. There’s a muse for geography
and winter, a muse of fever
and distance, but there’s no afterlife 

for them. The carboniferous forests
left their coal behind, tree ferns
and lycophytes pressed fine-veined leaves
between black and combustible pages,

our open-pit understanding of the earth
almost legible in hindsight’s seamed light.

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Copyright 2007, Reginald Shepherd.
All Rights Reserved by Author.