Snake at the Wrist
by Margaret Kaufman

“Margaret Kaufman is a remarkably gifted poet . Her attention to the nuances of the natural world and to the quiet oscillations in the lives of her speakers is both exemplary and heartbreaking. Her exquisite sense of measure and restraint make her reckonings of the complex junctures of our lives all the more compelling and powerful as she quilts together her many fabrics of human celebration. This is a gorgeous collection.”
— David St. John

MARGARET KAUFMAN leads poetry workshops in Marin County, California, and edits fiction for The Marlboro Review. Kaufman's honors include a Marin County Artists' grant and the Anna Rosenberg Award. Limited letterpress editions of some of her poems have been published by The Janus Press, Gefn Press, and Protean Press. Chronicle Books published a trade edition of Aunt Sallie's Lament.

Snake at the Wrist is Margaret Kaufman's first full collection. She lives in Kentfield, California.

A POEM FROM Snake at the Wrist

Tree of Life, a Triptych

I.

The tree, its branches laden
one of them propped with a forked
pole to support the weight of nectarines.
Rising from ice plant on the slope,
a mist of fruit flies.

II.

Small devotional:
in a pool of rotting fruit
quail devour the windfall.

III.

A woman carries two baskets,
yellow ochre against the blue
of her denim skirt, her workshirt.
She is no angel,
that patch of white
her apron, not a wing,
her lips parted slightly as if
she is speaking to the tree
or to herself, asking
Does redemption come down
not to what we take but what we leave,
whether left or taken up ourselves?

Or maybe she is Ruth in the emptied field
or another widow wondering
what will become of her, taken up by law
by her husband's brother:
even that marriage a kind of gleaning.