Featured Poem 2/27/07

Al Held's American Bruges III

You've been here:
      when you were swingin' iron
when your Baby threw up in the roller coaster
      that night before the geometry quiz
that night before they shot the old bridge out of the river
      before the hamster died of a heart attack in his exercise wheel
only moments before the clouds left for the last time
just seconds before the mountains flattened themselves like a
      burst boil
and you said,
      "yellow has never done that before."

—Jennifer Vaughan Jones
after Bruges III, Al Held (American, b. 1928)

previously published in Wisconsin Poets at the Elvehjem Museum of Art

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