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Leaflet on Wooing

By Lucie Brock-BroidoPosted Tuesday, July 15, 2003, at 11:50 AM ET

Listen to Lucie Brock-Broido reading this poem.

Wanting is reposed and plump
As the hands of a Romanov child

Folded in the doeskin sashes of her lap,
Paused before the little war begins.

This one will be guttural, this war.
How is it possible to still be startled

As I am by the oblong silhouette of the coiling
Index finger of a pending death.

No longer will
Wooing be the wondrous

Thing, instead, a homely domesticity, constant
As a field of early rye and yarrow-light.

What one is fit to stand is not what one is
Given, necessarily, and not this night.

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Lucie Brock-Broido is the author of A Hunger and The Master Letters. Her third book, Trouble in Mind, will be out later this year. She lives in Cambridge, Mass., and in New York City, where she is Director of Poetry in the School of the Arts at Columbia University.

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