Nick Lantz, “Battle of Alexander at Issus”

Off in the mountains a hermit checks
his rabbit traps before returning
to his hut for the night. The rabbits grow
bold near dawn and dusk, the hours
when clouds lower ladders of light
down the mountainsides. The hermit
hasn’t admired this light in decades.
At this time of day he is always bent
low, unfastening the thin leather snares
from around still-warm necks. If he hears
what sounds like thunder in the valley
one cloudless evening as he ties another
limp body to his belt, he thinks only
of returning home to bed, the rabbit fleas
that torment his sleep, the door that never
quite closes against the cold night air.

Back in February, I featured another Nick Lantz poem, “Lacuna, Triptych of the Battle,” from the collection We Don’t Know We Don’t Know. The poem above is from the second of Lantz’s collections published this year, The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House, which also contains “Portmanterrorism” (from The Writer’s Almanac). Oh, and back when I wrote about We Don’t Know…, I didn’t know you could find “Your Family’s Farm, Empty” online, or maybe you couldn’t, then.

Lantz discussed this book in an interview with The Rumpus: “It’s the much-revised remnants of my MFA thesis, and it had been collecting rejection slips since 2005. A poem in that book alludes to the Ship of Theseus, a boat that was supposedly maintained over many years by replacing its parts piecemeal as they deteriorated, begging the question of whether it was still the same ship, and, if not, at what point it ceased being that original ship. That’s how I feel about The Lightning. If you were to dig up my actual MFA thesis (please don’t), you’d see only a handful of the original poems. With The Lightning, I worked from the poems up. I was figuring out what that book was about as I assembled, disassembled, and reassembled it.”

By the way, Rumpus readers were also treated to the premiere publication of another Lantz poem: “How to Dance When You Do Not Know How to Dance.”

7 July 2010 | poetry |