David Dodd Lee

Late-Fall Lullaby

“Somebody loves us all.”
Elizabeth Bishop

Kelly Clarkson has a new show
on one of the networks—the eyeball
network or the peacock network—I
understood this because of a
premonition. The wolves go to the
mountains, the tip of each waterfall
in their glimmering coats painted silver.
I listen to pine needles blow
against the side of my house
delicate as candy canes breaking
across the kitchen floor. Somewhere,
a television executive is smiling
too much or not at all. He signs his
name across a lady’s cast, taking all
the credit. I wake up. It’s time, I
guess, to plug in the desktop radio,
listen for the carotene to stop pinging
yellow in the maple leaves…
Let my remaining days settle in
like a scene from a blizzard
nativity—frankincense, snowdrifts,
and a chocolate bar at the ready,
the little rectangles of which can
be broken apart, consumed at one’s
leisure, and repackaged for later
inside the thinnest of golden foils.

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David Dodd Lee is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014) and Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press, 2010), as well as a forthcoming book of collages, erasure poems and original poems, entitled Unlucky Animals. His poems most recently have appeared in New Ohio Review, Ocean State Review, Guesthouse, Copper Nickel, TriQuarterly, The Nation and Willow Springs. He writes and makes visual art and kayaks in Northern Indiana, where he lives on the St. Joseph River. He is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University South Bend, where he is also Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press, as well as the online literary magazine The Glacier.