Three Poems

Photograph by Ron/Comstock/Jupiterimages/Thinkstock.

Click the arrow on the audio player to?hear T.R. Hummer read "Imperial." You can also download?the recording or?subscribe?to?Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.

There are few still standing now who remember
??? when they sold Prince Albert in a can.
He was beautifully dressed, a fine trope of a man,
??? with a beard, and a nose, and slender
As the riding crop the Queen used to punish him
??? when he forgot his place?inside the oblong tin
Farmers bought in country stores: imperially thin
??? like Richard Corey in the famous poem.
They were near contemporaries. But you can?t imagine
??? the Prince Consort doing himself in.
In my mind he rides close to the hearts of men
??? in work-shirt pockets; he ministers to the ways
Of colonials blind to the pressure of Victoria?s corset stays.

Click the arrow on the audio player to?hear T.R. Hummer read "Pandrol Jackson." You can also download?the recording.

Along a derelict railroad, abandoned machinery takes
??? its last tour of duty toward rust. Another town is stalling.
Another house smolders with rot while a television rages.
??? Crows patrol banked cinders beside a landfill with a sign:
No Dumping. We were Jews in Austria. No, we spoke German
??? in Czechoslovakia?by order of the Alliance, we filed
Into a railroad car and died. No, we were black in Arkansas.
??? Here is a filthy contraption, like a grim lawn mower
With flanged iron wheels, Pandrol Jackson in blue paint
??? on its rotted housing: a rail grinder, used to polish steel
To brilliance, forgotten here as after the Rapture. And the carcass
??? of a boxcar warps just down the track, groaning with a cargo of bones.

Click the arrow on the audio player to?hear T.R. Hummer read "Bloodflower Sermon." You can also download?the recording.

The wind has windflowers, the sea anemones,
??? death its endless procession of white bouquets.
We homeless ones circle a field in the guise of nightshade,
??? absent our own blossoming. We nameless ones drop
No petals on the sandstone patio. A turbulent shaft of light
??? strips us down to our essence and beats us raw.
What chance did we ever have, Great Ones, to be anything
??? but planted in tilth in the end, and sentenced to calcium?

For Slate's poetry submission guidelines, click here. Click here?to visit Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project site.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=3876fdc53598dbafa12cb718d9d6e10e

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