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Fall/Winter 2000 Volume I Issue I

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Lee Upton
is the author of four books of poetry, including the recently published collection
Civilian Histories,

as well as
Approximate Darling
, The Invention of Kindness, and No Mercy, a winner of the National Poetry Series Competition.  In praising her work,  The New York Times Book Review states, "[Upton's] poems about dreams transform the often mundane quality of life in an overly materialistic America into something imaginative and spiritual."

 Upton has also written three books of literary criticism, most recently The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery in Five American Poets.  A Professor at the Department of English of Lafayette College, she lives in Easton, Pennsylvania. 

Apology to Keats

Lee Upton

How the season surrounds us and mistakes
itself for some other force,
while we may be left wondering:
What was she doing
with our bolt of wishes?
Reverberants
through the ground with the spoils
of acorn, gourd.
One life
inverted into a swollen detail,
until what we wished for squeaked
half-liquid and ripe
under our breastbones,
turning us pliant to one world in another world,
the point of falling, of leave-taking,
abrupt processions
wind-shuffled and splitting.
Like fire and time, it must be stolen
while falling.
What's fallen is anyone's.
What comes through air to ground.
Just that much space.
A short dive.

Think how easy it would be to ruin our lives.

Also by Lee Upton:

The Broom