Smokehouse by Jeffrey Harrison

Poems

November 2012

Smokehouse

Burke

was right!

Brick painted white on the outside, and inside
blackened by smoke, windowless, it stood
in the driveway’s circle as if central to our lives
and not, as even in childhood we knew,
the vestige of a long-gone epoch, post-bellum,
now used only for storing rusty bicycles,
old grills, tires worn smooth, chipped flower pots,
bird feeders, shovels, rakes with bent prongs,
red dented gas can, green hoses coiled like snakes.

It scared my brothers and me to unlatch the door
that was one shade darker than the yews that flanked it
and grew shaggier, taller, and more shadowy each year,
but one time, playing hide and seek, I crept
into that dim cell smelling of dank ash,
cool even in summer, like a mausoleum,
and hung, as my eyes adjusted, with cobwebs,
wasp nests, and tattered snake skins---shivering,
heart pounding, praying to be found.

Jeffrey Harrison

Webcasts

Poet George Green reads from his award-winning Lord Byron's Foot
George Green reads from Lord Byron's Foot, his collection of poetry that won the 2012 New Criterion Poetry Prize at a Friends & Young Friends event.

Celebration of the Life of Robert H. Bork, 1927–2012
From the memorial service for Robert H. Bork on April 9, 2013 at the Mayflower Hotel, Washington, DC.

James Panero on price gouging at the Met, with Fred Dicker
Are public museums like the Met overburdening visitors with "recommended" admission fees? Panero goes on 1300 AM to discuss his latest Daily News article during Fred Dicker's Albany-based radio program.

Weblog

Ansel Adams in Queens

by Brian P. Kelly

May 21, 2013 05:38 PM

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by Eric Simpson

May 20, 2013 02:11 PM

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by Roger Kimball

May 19, 2013 08:07 PM

The New Criterion

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