One Promise of Green

Clean Coal Burn belongs in the tradition of James Wright, whose poems of coal mines and slag heaps nevertheless reveal love of a scarred but resilient land. In these poems beauty is found in unlikely places such as the haze over a corn field or the words of a man whose throat has been destroyed by black lung disease but who writes that there is beauty in the afterbirth of a sheep which steams in the spring snow “as if the land were alive.” While there is death—of miners or parents—there is also resurrection—in the new growth and new generations.

— Deborah Fleming

Overflow, 1978

after a portrait of Helga Testorf by Andrew Wyeth

I cannot allow the darkness in,

though it waits just outside

the window like the eyes of all those

who would not approve of my time

alone with you. I try to focus on the light,

the way it glows upon your supine form

stretched out across a narrow bed

barely big enough to hold your body.

But with each dappled stroke,

the brush in my hand transforms

you into a marble graveyard angel

toppled by the weight of sunlight

and too many lonely years to count.

I