National Poetry Month Vintage Colorado Poetry Poems of Protest / Poem of the Week April 3, 2006
		The Balkan Peninsula has a long bloody history.
				Bled, Slovenia by Mary Crow, Poet Laureate of Colorado A pheasant's scouring through the sandy strip of alkali where broom and rabbitbrush flourished, the long whirr of its passage, flipped me back to the pianissimo of the Bach chaconne spilling an opaque scent that afternoon before the insurrection, that afternoon where furor, or rather, furious talkers shadowed forth what was to be: Henchmen. . . . Dental records. . . . Later, a castle on a cliff at Bled overlooking the placid lake, sun dripping into water, a lamp's yellow flourish. We stopped for wine and poetry. Hallucination: that pheasant sputtering, the Bach withdrawing. In the cave-like interior, orange, a new music--a slow cadence un-scrolling down and down. And down. First published in The American Poetry Review (March / April 2000).  Revised, 2006.  Copyright (c) 2000, 2006 by Mary Crow. Used with the author's permission.
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