As Earth Begins to End
Patricia Goedicke
Copper Canyon Press, 136 pages, $14
Spare, tender, complex, this moving collection of poems tells the story of two people in love throughout their adult lives, and the changes and challenges the passage of time visits upon them. As Goedicke explores the vagaries of human relationships and the natural world, she treads rich emotional landscape, as in the title poem:
I reach out my hand and it sinks through you like soft fruit.
O tree to which I have attached my banner
I know you’re leaving me
as you must; in the hospital you say my name
but I’m deaf, I can’t hear you,
as the plane slides from the gate
which one of us is on it
and which left behind, I’ve never been able to tell
where we end and the earth begins beyond us.
