Michael Collier

My grandfather’s right eye was a frozen slab
of milk-white ice that light never thawed
and when he slept, the lid didn’t drown
the curse of its constant stare.

The workers specialize according to their age.
At first they feed the queen her royal jelly
and then they nurse the larvae in their combs.

This was before the time of lithium and Zoloft

before mood stabilizers and anxiolytics

and almost all the psychotropic drugs, but not before thorazine,

which the suicide O’Laughlin called “handcuffs for the mind.”

While Wordsworth and Crane express differing levels of anxiety about the relationship of poetry to the materiality of the industrial and modern eras, Whitman expresses none. “I will make the poems from materials,” he writes in “Starting...