This month we reach back into the archive and feature Joyce Carol Oates’s “Like This…So This.” The poem appeared in the Autumn 1969 of Poetry Northwest. Also appearing in that issue: Kenneth O. Hanson, C.G. Hanzlicek, Stephen Dobyns, and Jay Wright.
Like This…So This
Teaching mathematics on the blackboard
deepens the curse of prophecy:
everything willed will happen
The room is filled with motes
hard as gold that must
happen
willful light that cannot not
happen
So my eyes must narrow
at the sight
of you
So improbably beasts
headed stiffly by human heads
or the human-headed bull
or the horse cursed with a spike
in its forehead
of ivory
wander listless among
barns and coops and pens
their tracks in the tame snow
wandering heavily homeward they
butt with their monster
or human heads
the doors of ordinary enclosures
cursed they rub their heads
against the ordinary
doors
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