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Serpent Mound, Locust Grove, Ohio
"EGG SERIES"
Copyright by KOSTAS KONSTANTOPOULOS

Serpent Mound,
Locust Grove, Ohio

A poem by Mary Grimm

Curves, furred with grass, snaking,
the path arced across the green.
On the observation tower, your foot
is posed over the air, the welded metal
holding you in but quivering with every
breath. The ground is unmoved
but moving, each loop rearranging itself
as you walk by. Grass-bladed, mowed
in curves, frozen into the ground,
these hidden baskets of earth the same
since their careful placement—how long
is it now? The tail is curved in a tight
coil, the mouth yawns wide to grasp
the egg that births the world.

Copyright 2006 by Mary Grimm

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Mary GrimmMary writes:
These two poems were both responses to landscapes, one ordinary, one almost other-worldly. And they both seem to me to be about time—the hold the past has on our present-day lives, and how that hold intensifies every once in a while so that we're shaken a little out of ourselves.

Mary Grimm is a fiction writer, and more lately a poet; her novel Left to Themselves and a story collection, Stealing Time, were published by Random House. She currently teaches creative writing at Case Western Reserve University and is working on a novel about ghost hunters.

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