The Street of Clocks

The poems gathered in THE STREET OF CLOCKS are lyrical monologues urgently delivered by a narrator who both loves the world and has intense quarrels with it. Often set against a vivid landscape--the rural America of Thomas Lux's childhood and unidentified places south of the border--these poems speak with mesmerizing intensity from rivers and swamps, deserts and lawns, jungles and the depths of the sea. They address the snakes, parrots, or sand fleas living there, as well as their human cohabitants, who are sometimes benign, as in the beautiful title poem ("Meet me there, you remember, the corner / of Paris and Porter"), and sometimes emphatically not so. The language is distilled and musical, lucid and strange, playful and dead serious, and always specific. Thomas Lux's first all-new volume in seven years is a significant addition to the work of an utterly original, highly accomplished poet. As Sven Birkerts has written, "Lux may be one of the poets on whom the future of the genre depends. He has the stuff to win readers back from their unhappy places of exile."

Contents

Cucumber Fields Crossed by High-Tension Wires 1 The Man into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball 2 Plague Victims Catapulted over Walls into Besieged City 3 Bonehead 4 Beauty School 5 In the Bedroom Above the Embalming Room 6 So We Can See the Snakes Coming 7 Thomas the Broken-Mouthed 8 The Handsome Swamp 9 The Blister Test 10 From Grade School Window, Watching Local Bookie Arrested 11 Grain Burning Far Away 12 The Doldrum Fracture Zone 13 The Nerve Doctors 14 The Poison Shirt 15 The Road That Runs Beside the River 16 A Kiss 17 A Bird, Whose Wingtips Were on Fire, 18 Shotgun Loaded with Rock Salt 20 Slimehead (Hoplostethus atlanticus) 21 Pre-Cerebral 22 Salve 23 Jungleside 24 Regarding (Most) Songs 25 A Voiceless Parrot Learns to Read and Write and Play the Trumpet 26 Beggars Bowl Stolen 27 A Man Gets Off Work Early 28 Baby, Still Crying, Swallowed by a Snake 29 Rommels Asparagus 30 Plastic Castle in Goldfish Bowl 31 Stubblefield Dusted with Snow 32 The Downslope Winds 33 A Library of Skulls 34 Marine Snow at Mid-Depths and Down 36 An Erg 37 The War of Jenkinss Ear (1739–1741) 38 Lucky 39 The Fish-Strewn Fields 40 Shoreless 41 Unlike, for Example, the Sound of a Riptooth Saw 42 Cordon Sanitaire 43 Henry Clays Mouth 44 The Language Animal 45 Pencil Box Shaped Like a Gun 46 The Corner of Paris and Porter 48 The Bandage Factory 50

Notes 51