looked and blessed your beauty.

Lucy, when you are with me

I feel the atoms

racing everywhere

in this old oak table,

in the eight-pointed double-star spider,

and in the starry rippling all around us.

Skeleton Woman, Guardian, Death Woman, Lucy,

Here, a picnic, corn bread, here, an orange

with Martín and me at the lip of the Earth Surface World.

Notes

“The branches” is for Jody Gladding.

“Diana”: the poem draws on Norman O. Brown’s “Metamorphoses ii: Actaeon.”

“He Disappeared into Complete Silence”: Louise Bourgeois, plate 8, 1947.

LUCY

The Holy Bible, King James Version.

my saxifrage that splits the rocks”—see “A Sort of a Song,” by William Carlos Williams: “Saxifrage is my flower that splits / the rocks.” The William Carlos Williams Reader, New Directions, 1966.

Nikolay and Ieronim are in Chekhov’s story “Easter Eve,” in The Bishop and Other Stories, translated by Constance Garnett, The Ecco Press, 1985.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, Riverhead Trade, 2005.

Martín Ramírez was a Mexican immigrant painter who lived for fifteen years in DeWitt State Hospital in California, until his death in 1963. His work was shown at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City in 2007.

About the Author

Jean Valentine was born in Chicago, earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College, and has lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her collection Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965–2003, was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Her work has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, the Bunting Institute (now the Radcliffe Institute), the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Award, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and a fellowship from Lannan Foundation.

Books by Jean Valentine

Break the Glass

Little Boat

Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965–2003

The Lighthouse Keeper: Essays on the Poetry of Eleanor Ross Taylor, editor

The Cradle of the Real Life

Growing Darkness, Growing Light

The Under Voice: Selected Poems (Ireland)

The River at Wolf

Home.Deep.Blue: New and Selected Poems

The Messenger

Ordinary Things

Pilgrims

Dream Barker

Link

Acknowledgments

Alaska Quarterly Review

The American Poetry Review

Blackbird

Chicago Review

The Cortland Review

Field

Great River Review

The Laurel Review

The Massachusetts Review

Narrative

The Nation

The New Yorker

PMS

Poetry International

upstreet

“Lucy” was published in Sarabande Books’ Quarternote Chapbook Series in 2009.

Heartfelt gratitude to Kaveh Bassiri, Sarah Heller, Joan Larkin, Jan Heller Levi, Jack Lynch, Anne Marie Macari, and Stephanie Smith; and to everyone at the MacDowell Colony, Ucross, and at Sarabande Books and Copper Canyon Press.