Cover

Title Page

Jim Dodge

Selected Poems and Short Prose

Dedication

for

Victoria Stockley Dodge

covivant for over thirty years, the last seven as wife;
nerve of my soul, love of my life

Contents

Notes and Acknowledgments

Selected Poems and Short Prose

Learning to Talk

The Cookie Jar

Things Thought Through

On Balance

Decomposition

Psycho Ecology

Life of the Spirit

Aweigh

Tao-to-Tao

To Be

Practice, Practice, Practice

Wisdom and Happiness

Red Sails

Squall & Commotion

Slow Learner

Bathing Joe

Mahogany China

The First Cut Is the Deepest

Waiting for Houdini to Come Up

The Countessa

Venison Stew

Winter Song

On Humor: On Mating Donkeys and Onions

Watering the Garden on the Hottest Day of the Summer

Palms to the Moon

A Firmer Grasp of the Obvious

The Work of Art

Steelhead Fishing, Smith River, January

The Third Bank of the River

Green Side Up

One Thing After Another

Unnatural Selections: A Meditation upon Witnessing a Bullfrog Fucking a Rock

Fishing Devil’s Hole at the Peak of Spring

Getting After It

How to Catch the Biggest Fish

Hard Work

There It Is

Knowing When to Stop

Vacation Expenses

Basic Precepts and Avuncular Advice for Young Men

Killing

Death and Dying

New Poems and Short Prose

The Banker

The Real Last Words of Billy the Kid

The Moving Part of Motion

How About

Necessary Angels

Prayer Bones

Magic and Beauty

Day Moon

Karma Bird

The Tunnel

Hagerty Wrecks Another Company Truck

Obsession

Love Find

Flux

Thanks for the Dance

The Stone

Woman in a Room Full of Rubber Numbers

Reason to Live

Scratch

Salvage

An Epithalamium for Victoria

Falling into Place

Play-By-Play

Job Application

The Mouth of the River

The Prior and Subsequent Heavens

Old Growth

Three Ways to Get the Carrot on the Stick

Eurydice Ascending

The Drought of ’76

True Account of the Saucer People

About Time

Smithereens

Jack o’ Hearts Shopping Mortmart

Holy Shit

Notes and Acknowledgments

With few exceptions, the selected work in this volume appeared in limited edition letterpress broadsides, cards, and chapbooks published by Jerry Reddan’s Tangram Press in Berkeley, California, who also designed this volume. I’ve worked almost exclusively with Jerry for two decades, always with a sense of privilege, delight, and gratitude.

The first group of poems in this book, from “Learning to Talk” through “Bathing Joe,” constitutes annual Winter Solstice cards mailed to friends and colleagues, and also includes a few broadsides and occasional verse.

The poems from “Mahogany China” through “A Firmer Grasp of the Obvious” are selected from Palms to the Moon, a loose group of love poems published in 1987 in an edition limited to 100 copies and given away to friends and fellow practitioners.

Bait & Ice, a small gathering of poems on fishing, philosophy, and nature, was released in 1991 in an edition of 175, and includes the poems from “The Work of Art” through “Fishing Devil’s Hole at the Peak of Spring.”