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Birthday Poem

Hot, rained-on, packed-down straw, strewn then abandoned between the rows of eggplant, tomato plants, onion, and herbs catches the evening's last September gnats in pale mats and renders, for a moment, the fall surrender untenable.

Impossible, too, to make this sign--your birthday month-- the winding vine of grapes at harvest, for who could drink in this heat, or light the candles and praise the cake? The half-century it took to make the man you are is far

outstripped by the tipped and tilting present tense in which you accurately move, correcting the angle of guyed bamboo, brushing a confusion of wings from the plot, and not, in the slightest sense, wincing ahead to the unfathomable,

intolerable winter, for straw, you said, muffles the living so they can't hear the dead.

Lynne McMahon

June 13, 2002

Hot, rained-on, packed-down straw, strewn then abandoned between the rows of eggplant, tomato plants, onion, and herbs catches the evening’s last September gnats in pale mats and renders, for a moment, the fall surrender untenable.

Impossible, too, to make this sign–your birthday month– the winding vine of grapes at harvest, for who could drink in this heat, or light the candles and praise the cake? The half-century it took to make the man you are is far

outstripped by the tipped and tilting present tense in which you accurately move, correcting the angle of guyed bamboo, brushing a confusion of wings from the plot, and not, in the slightest sense, wincing ahead to the unfathomable,

intolerable winter, for straw, you said, muffles the living so they can’t hear the dead.

Lynne McMahon


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