Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Dreams By No One's Daughter: Pitt Poetry Series
Dreams By No One's Daughter: Pitt Poetry Series
Dreams By No One's Daughter: Pitt Poetry Series
Ebook73 pages16 minutes

Dreams By No One's Daughter: Pitt Poetry Series

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

Read preview

About this ebook

“Leslie Ullman traces through her speaker one woman’s attempt to find herself and then to live that discovered self within an alien wilderness that ranges from the indifferent to the frankly dangerous. This volume edges toward the growing certainty to plain chance and lucky or unlucky coincidence. Perhaps in response to the uncertain nature of the external world in Dreams by No One’s Daughter, Ullman’s are very much poems of metamorphosis, of becoming rather than static being.” —Stephen C. Behrendt
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 2, 2016
ISBN9781504029360
Dreams By No One's Daughter: Pitt Poetry Series
Author

Leslie Ullman

Leslie Ullman is professor emerita of creative writing at the University of Texas–El Paso (UTEP), where she established and directed the Bilingual MFA Program. She currently teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Ullman is the author of three poetry collections: Natural Histories (winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award), Dreams by No One’s Daughter, and Slow Work Through Sand (co-winner of the 1997 Iowa Poetry Prize). Her poems and essays have been published in a number of magazines and literary journals.

Read more from Leslie Ullman

Related to Dreams By No One's Daughter

Related ebooks

Poetry For You

View More

Related articles

Related categories

Reviews for Dreams By No One's Daughter

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

2 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    Dreams By No One's Daughter - Leslie Ullman

    I

    HARD CIDER

    Even to those who are dying, the season

    shows its hand, filling the ditches

    with jewels: mica fish and emerald mallards.

    Draft horses prance in their filigreed

    traces, heady with sun and a premonition

    of frost. They barely touch the earth

    as the farmers themselves spring from the ground,

    in their prime, their wooden clogs

    caked with sweet mud. Everything they touch

    turns to sheaves, loaves, luminous

    preserves; the scent of cooking strains

    at walls and beams that surround

    young wives. And everywhere trees, having

    borne the brunt of summer,

    rise stately as half-clothed women lifting

    baskets to their heads. They have waited

    in greenery and silence, suddenly

    to cradle perfect apples.

    Even to those who are dying, this land looks

    as it would from the air, or to a Sunday painter

    dozing on a hill—a quilt of gardens and threading streams,

    hills in waves, green squares, russets, gleaming

    pitchfork, the painted noontime jug. No smell of old sweat

    lingering in homespun. No hard words with the wife.

    No palm across the cheek, tears, thin gruels

    in the early dusk that gathers itself up north.

    Even to those who are dying, the last of the hummingbirds

    is a bright leaf riding the wind, and the hawk

    sharing its patch of sky for a time

    too plump, too brightly feathered, to kill.

    THE ORIGIN OF TEARS

    You’re about to speak

    and they take you

    by surprise, little natives

    beating drums in your throat.

    A music the body listens to.

    The push the lump from its

    familiar cave, and your chest

    aches with loosened rock.

    Now your face melts, a child face,

    boneless again in a landscape that blurs

    to the salt water the world

    once was, and your body cracks

    into islands and fish and

    bottomless space that somehow

    does not fly apart.

    The bird inside you screams.

    You don’t make a sound. Grief,

    dreaming among the fallen trees,

    answers, suddenly light on his feet—

    he seizes your dry

    pod of a heart, summons

    voice after voice you never use,

    and now you are dancing, unable

    to return to your country, hostage

    until he has finished dance after dance

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1