The Nation announces the winners of Discovery/The Nation, the Joan Leiman Jacobson Poetry Prize of the Unterberg Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y. Now in its twenty-ninth year, it is an annual contest for poets whose work has not been published previously in book form. The new winners are Patrick Phillips, Robert Sawyer, Kary Wayson and Joel Whitney. This year’s judges are April Bernard, Lucie Brock-Broido and James Lasdun. As in the past, manuscripts were judged anonymously. Distinguished former winners of Discovery/The Nation include Susan Mitchell, Katha Pollitt, Mary Jo Salter, Sherod Santos, Arthur Smith, Emily Heistand, Debora Greger, Roseanna Warren and David St. John. This year’s Discovery/The Nation event, featuring readings by the four winners, is scheduled for 8:15 pm on Monday, May 5, at the Unterberg Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue (92nd and Lexington Avenue) in New York City. –Grace Schulman, poetry editor

In the Museum of Your Last Day

There is a coat on a coat-hook in a hall. Work-gloves in the pockets: pliers and bent nails.

There is a case of Quaker State for the Ford. Two cans of spray-paint in a crisp brown bag.

A mug on a book by the hi-fi. A disc that starts on its own: Boccherini.

There is a dent in the soap the shape of your thumb. A swirl in the glass when it fogs.

And a gray hair that twines through the tines of a little black comb.

There is a watch laid smooth on a wallet. And pairs of your shoes everywhere.

A phone that no one answers. A note that says Friday. Your voice on the tape talking softly.

PATRICK PHILLIPS

The Mean Time

After San Francisco, after getting back from going to San Francisco, I wash one glass while I unpack and collect the half-eaten apples of the afternoon I left all afternoon. All through each room of the intolerable tract house of the afternoon. The interim of the airplane, the interrogation of the seat strap, then out into the bright humiliation of high noon and I’m back to the embarrassment of the bathroom where the one window watches while I tweeze tiny fingers from the breast of the bath mat between twelve and two. I can feel my feet because I can feel my feet on fire. Burnt to the slack asphalt of the black tarmac staunching the center of the living room. I am burning because I’ve been built to burn and I have been burning because I’ve been left to burn and I am still burning, built like a boat tied to a float and I am forbidden to turn.

KARY WAYSON

Composed in Your Absence

After W.S. Merwin

When you leave, the starving of the limes begins in earnest. The grandfather clock freezes in another time. The second hand ascends a white hill with no top,

where the Lord of Increment sleeps under his smoke-feather quilt, and (within a ring, like ruined peppermint) the unplanted red azalea wilts.

At night, the snake in the little bower crawls backwards into his clouded skin. And all the medicines beside the shower

argue with the green phials they’re in. And the icicles–inverted towers– drop glass from the gutter’s jagged tin.

JOEL WHITNEY

Enameled Twilight

This place, so real, it appears artificial Like the painted backdrop Of some Technicolor musical Where real was simply not good enough. Here too are colors too true– Blue without a drop Of anything that isn’t blue.

The sky, sapphire And the gently rolling spaces Enameled with a hard ice shell The blue of a weak gas flame.

And these trees too are blue. Bereft of song and sway They tremble against a transparent sky Like hands reaching for a moment More of life.

The park’s enameled. Above it, nothing flies, Across it, nothing moves Except for this polished ribboned path And my own darting brown eyes.

ROBERT SAWYER