About Nance Van Winckel More Poems by Nance Van Winckel Having to Decide Amongst Ourselves Man Shaving a Woman's Leg Little Blue Heron I Watched Her Go Keep the Engine Running What My Father Would Say Order Nance Van Winckel's latest book from Amazon!

Nance Van Winckel Give it Up I lie down in one dream, sleeping toward another. Losing the trail of the story, then finding it again. Obliquely aware of a world beyond the window: winds that aim to enter, battering down the pines, then licking them back up.     And that's how the deacons did their work:      a cup of cool wine and a rod     across the wrist. Not to whimper     when they went past. A stranger     with a hieroglyphic scrawl     wrote this down -- since I dozed on, since some motorcycle was ratcheting up the road's fourth gear and out into the dead end: this rye field in which a girl stood kissing the deacons' dusty sons, and keeping count. What hand shook? Who sighed, who whimpered -- God     help them. Not to win and not to wake     until some angel bangs at the door. She     wants. She wants the life inside,     the one that cries or bleats or shrieks     as it's handed over     into her arms.