Two poems by Dargie Anderson

Lord Plant My Feet On Higher Ground
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As the week went on we started to take a minute from shoveling
or unloading something on the hillside to stand and watch
the river, a half-mile below through a husk of cloud and rain.
Tuesday the water came up through the far fenceline. Wednesday

it crept over the pastures. Thursday it sifted through the holly grove,
soaked the lake. The rain didn't stop.
I woke in the middle of the night to hear it
running down the window by my bed. The clothes dryer

in the front hall worked itself away from the wall
turning over our jackets and coveralls.
Friday in the middle of lunch Wayne pulled up in his truck
and said he needed all the young people to come with him-

we clambered in back, jumpy, swapping looks,
did a heifer get a foot stuck in the cattle guard, was a truck stuck
somewhere, whatever you need me to do, Wayne-
The cattle needed to come up from the bottoms.

Drenched and freezing and covered with shit for hours all day
we pushed the animals across ditches and broad new lakes, through gaps in fences,
to chutes into trailers, up roads to dry land-first the stockers,
then Gerald's herd, then Hayes'.

By nightfall up on the hill, cattle grazed driveways and barnyards,
the chicken pasture, the parking lot, the construction site, the grass
by my window. The bottoms were waters, flat, dark, with a face, and something
moving over it, maybe the spirit of god, we weren't sure, we didn't know.

Leaning On the Everlasting Arms
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By Dargie Anderson

I don't remember if the reverend's eyes were green, or blue,
or maybe I'm confusing him with Jesus in those portraits;
they had the same gaze. I think of him standing behind the altar with the bread.
I AM has sent me to you, he read; I AM WHO I AM.

I've got it narrowed down
to Methodist or Baptist, his daughter
told me in the car on the way to Conway
to hear a famous man speak.

Jesse was at church the Sunday
her father had gripped the sides of the pulot
and shouted something about Jesus having triumphed
over the ACLU.

It wasn't as boring as I thought it would be,
she told me in the car driving home.

In taking her I had done, my friend told me,
a good deed, and anyway
we got to drive by St. Benedict's, a carpenter gothic
set way back in the flat behind that bend,
and I was always glad to do that.

Marjorie (Dargie) Anderson, who is scheduled to graduate from the MFA program in creative writing this spring, won this year's $5,000 Theodore Roethke Prize in the Hopwood Program. A Ohioan and Yale graduate, Anderson founded a journal dedicated to writings about women and athletics at Yale.

The Roethke Prize is named in honor of the Saginaw, Michigan, poet who graduated from U-M in 1929, received his MA in 1936 and an honorary doctorate of literature degree in 1962. The prize is given for the "best long poem or poetic sequence written by a University of Michigan student."

Anderson plans to stay in Ann Arbor after graduation and teach while she expands her prize-winning manuscript into her first volume of poetry.

(Linda Robinson Walker wrote a biographical article about Theodore Roethke for Michigan Today's Summer 2001 issue. It may be read online at http://www.umich.edu/~newsinfo/MT/01/Sum01/mt1s01a.html.)

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