Off-Season in the Promised Land

These poems speak to the various ways we exile ourselves from a paradise that is available at any given moment. A young girl practicing flute on the end of a pier, furniture repair, an ancient shark tooth, the deaths of friends--these are some of Makuck's subjects. His short lyrics and long narratives vary from comic to elegiac, often finding their locus in the landscapes of coastal North Carolina. "For twenty-five years, in his poems and stories, Peter Makuck has been finding the extraordinary in the ordinary...In his new collection of poems, Off-Season in the Promised Land, Makuck's eye is Lasik-sharp, attentive to the surface, and penetrating to the core." --Prairie Schooner

For The Woman at The Dock Who Asked What It Was Like Down There

Like easing out of the body
into sleep or love, no need for words
to rise toward the quicksilver surface,
rising on a waver of light from the Atlas, a tanker
eighty feet down

Like the difference between light
and the weight you feel
when you first hit the deck shedding water,
mask, fins, belt, and tank,
almost light again

Like drifting off, our moonlit wetsuits
swimming in place on the cord between porch posts,
lighter still in the onshore breeze, drying,
becoming lighter, loose-limbed and hovering
behind dunes swaying with sea oats. . . .

Then ghosting again
among queen angels and blue parrots
chromis and clouds of spot-tail pins gliding
by encrusted rails     horned cleats and sea doors
at ease among anemones
on the tanker wreck     this great garden of rust  

©BOA Editions, Ltd 2005

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