Preparing for Incarnations
1975
Comb-bound: 60 pp.
Published: 1999
Price: $9.95
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This book’s thirty-eight poems stitch Brodsky’s "awareness of days passing" into a crazy-quilt whose patches are the beautifully detailed memories captured from his daily life at home in Farmington, Missouri, his business trips throughout the Midwest, and his vacations to Fort Lauderdale, with his wife.
Time-and-Motion Analysis
Six and fifty-hundredths
Snatch me from weekend revelry.
Motion chases stasis
Jerkily around a circular dial
Of days calibrated in elements,
On a job of life and death.
Hundredths concatenate like seeds
Lifted from a severed pumpkin.
They cling in a mass of memory
Before forgetting they belong to me.
Dissipation is the funnel they use
To escape from hour to hour to day,
Until new data is collated,
Expectations are graded and measured
Against my previous performances,
And age is requested to set
A tighter rate on my operation.
Now, the accuracy of my quota defeats me.
