Poem of the Week: Eduardo C. Corral

   

All the Trees of the Field Shall Clap Their Hands

 

Josefa Segovia was tried, convicted & hanged on July 5, 1851, in Downieville, California, for killing an Anglo miner, a man who the day before had assaulted her.

Are the knees & elbows  

     the first knots   

  

                     the dead untie?

  

       I swing from a rope

  

                     lashed

  

       to a beam. Some men

  

along the Yuba river

  

               toss coins

  

         into the doubling water.

  

                   Visible skin.

  

            Memorable hair.

  

     Imagine: coal, plow,

  

                     rust, century.

  

                 All layers

  

         of the same palabra.

  

                                       Once

  

I mistook a peach pit

  

               on a white dish

  

         for a thumbprint.

  

   Wolf counselor.

  

                       Reaper.

  

             Small rock.

  

   The knot just under

  

       my right ear

  

whispers God is gracious,

  

             God will

increase. The soul,

  

                   like semen,

       escapes

  

the body

  

         swiftly.

-Eduardo C. Corral  

Use by permission.

From Slow Lightning (Yale University Press, 2012)

Photo by: JW Stovall 

Eduardo C. Corral is a CantoMundo fellow. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2012, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Quarterly West. His work has been honored with a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from Poetry, and writing residencies to the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. He has served as the Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and as the Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. Slow Lightning, his first book of poems, won the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, he currently lives in New York City.

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