Click here to subscribe. The new issue of Measure magazine features an essay by Seamus Heaney on Dylan Thomas’s legacy, interview with MacArthur Genius Grant winner A.E. Stallings, and poems by Thomas Lynch, Lucinda Roy, Ernest Hilbert, Rachel Hadas, Richard Wakefield, Wilmer Mills, Bruce Bond, Tony Barnstone, and Andrew Hudgins. Here is my poem “Yggdrasil” from the issue.

A Bach cantata slurs to static
On the stereo as a hurricane
Rumbles through our attic.

Barrages of quicksilver rain
Machine-gun aluminum.
Darkness drags around the lawn.

By afternoon, skies foam
To white. Air is washed clean.
The bright grass is strewn

With debris like a battle scene.
We round the house to discover
The chimney down, but intact,

Like some primitive ziggurat.
We kick leaves, find a pool cover,
Plastic bags, limbs storm-cracked,

Spilled out like roasted bird flesh with twists of fat.
A TV aerial needles up like the mast
Of a wrecked schooner. Beyond it,

We find the tilted apple tree.
What appeared, in the past,
So permanent is now split

Down the middle, pulled free
From its base by the storm.
Lumps of sweating soil spread

Where dendritic root protrudes into
Damp air, the tree’s capillary form
Capsized, not entirely dead,

But dying by parts where it grows.
A truck and great chain will haul
It from this earth, leave a hole

We’ll someday fill, a socket of mud
Where our tree once seemed so tall,
Now a den black like a vein of coal

Or splash of parched ancestral blood.