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Anne Marie Macari

Anne Marie Macari

Anne Marie Macari's third book, She Heads into the Wilderness (Autumn House, 2008), followed Gloryland (Alice James, 2005), and Ivory Cradle, which won the APR/Homickman first book prize in 2000. She has published in many journals and directs the Drew University Low-Residency Program in Poetry.

Mammoth In Snow

Rouffignac—Cave of a Hundred Mammoths
Ice clinks along strands of matted
hair, ice in my breathing. We are frozen
as far as we can see, a trail
across thousands of years, thousands
of winters in this bone-world.
This knowing is just a flash, a vortex,
as if a hawk could spiral
down instead of skyward and open
a pit in the earth and into it
I would fall, tipped
off my path. Maybe
I'm falling now
the sky moving farther from me
and I in a cold heap.
Snow against
snow, walls of dreams
and projections, a turning
toward private singing,
toward strings in my throat
and the tender tip
of my trunk, stroking. When I am
just an image I'll wander all through
the long torrent-scoured tunnels into
the crawling space where with one
finger moving fast
she paints me onto the ceiling and I'm alive
again with many herds: leapers, stampeders,
lonely stragglers. Snow mounds
like a soul over me—I huddle,
a massive beast
confused in the whiteout.

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