The Preface

some landscape for joan

​

​

My vanity

all kinds of roads

 

looking out

at the blue

black mountains

and so many

houses down

among the floor

the crime

of so many of us

 

big bold stripe

overhead

but its

different

too

it’s not how

the dinosaurs

saw

 

one volume

held what turned

out to

be the window

of my

life

 

I keep plunging

you just have

to wait

 

till it sees

you again

 

only that

one lens

 

to be

enough to the father

of the day

 

and her sound

it’s layed

out so regular

like god

 

and you just

pick out

your business

and land

on the land

 

the stripes

the crawling

ants; look what we’ve

done

 

the other

window

darker pony

I’m such

a mess

 

finally seeing

the end of

it thank

god is always

the mountains

and that’s

why we call

them friends

 

that’s my limit

 

and here’s the plane

now and the

town bump

​

​

EILEEN MYLES came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet, subsequently a novelist, public talker and art journalist. A Sagittarius, their twenty books include evolution (poems), Afterglow (a dog memoir), a 2017 re-issue of Cool for You, I Must Be Living Twice/new and selected poems, and Chelsea Girls. Eileen is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, four Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize from the PSA, and a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2016, Myles received a Creative Capital grant and the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing. In 2019 they'll be teaching at NYU and Naropa University and they live in New York and Marfa, TX.