Barley Child

Contents Series Editor’s Preface Because I Wish to Avoid Extravagant Claims, and Because God Is Patient with the Unborn I Portrait of a Woman between 1948 and 1949 Night Work Resonator Checker Cab Age 10, I Escape from the Work Farm and Pursuant to Court Order, Am Recaptured in a Cincinnati Amusement Park Angela Sweets, Black Pearls, Columbia Stars Burning Out the Redwings Jack Kennedy Whistle-Stops across Southern Michigan Experts Hope to Blow Out Oil Fire on Tuesday Arthur Godfrey Shuffle Puck, 1961 I’m Never Told of Family Funerals That Fall The Adoration Reliquary St. Brendan and the Foaming Sea (1964) Turnips In a Dream, My Father Decides to Go Ice Fishing The Washpoosh Man Shagbark Hickory To Recite the Mysteries Greetings II Beneath the Clock Tower, Main Gate The Marsh Harrier My Grandfather’s Herringbone Cap Grievous Angel Cotton House Fire The State of Maine Annie Kelly, 25 Winter Flounder Jim Gannon, with Dog and Model A, January 12, 1928 Among the 796 Dead Children at Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, Tuam, County Galway Dowsie Gannon, Age 2, in Cleveland Last Letter from Great-Aunt Nora Gannon, Resident at St. Margaret’s House of Industry (Infirmity Ward), Dublin, to Her American Nephew, Concerning the Spanish Civil War, John Dos Passos, Etc. Helldivers Ventrilo III Shotgun Death, with Dodge and Northern Catalpa At Mercywood, Theodore Roethke Instructs My Mother in the Care and Feeding of Peonies The Song from Moulin Rouge (1953) Nabokov at Big Da’s Drive-In Slumgullion Slowdown Letter to Dowsie, from Roethke in Ireland Crash Injures Six Children; Two Serious The Feast of St. Blaise Child atop a Half-Constructed Root Beer Stand, Swamping Hot Tar Destination Moon The Nazarene Blue Racer Early at Big Da’s Drive-In Missing Woman Found Alive in Quarry Elegy with Blue-Handled Filet Knife In Search of a Drinkie, Mam Sneaks Out of Assisted Living to Visit The Blue Merrow The Coney Island Translations To Tell the Hornets Bull Thistles Deus ex Machina Notes Acknowledgments