THIS BOOK WON THE 2007 SPUR AWARD FOR POETRY AND WAS A FINALIST FOR THE WILLA LITERARY AWARD, POETRY

Across the High Divide
Poetry
Laurie Wagner Buyer
$13.95
Winner: 2007 Spur Award
About the Author
When not hiking in the high country or on the road facilitating writing workshops, poet Laurie Wagner Buyer makes her home in Woodland Park, Colorado. She has two earlier poetry collections, Glass-eyed Paint in the Rain and Red Colt Canyon, as well as a novel, Side Canyons. Laurie has won numerous grants and awards, including a Colorado Council on the Arts Literature Artist Fellowship, and has an MFA from Goddard College.

Blurbs
“This book opens with a searing narrative lament called ‘Selling Guns’ and by the time you finish the final sequence you will know that Laurie Wagner Buyer is the real thing, a writer who has lived hard and worked at her trade. Across the High Divide is both a record of survival and a triumph of writing.”—DAVID MASON, author of Arrivals and Ludlow

“I admire Laurie Wagner Buyer for her strength as a person and her gifts as a writer. She’s a fighter, knows how to achieve her goals, and has the discipline to do so. This is part of what she has to offer her readers. Laurie has worked hard to find words that are adequate to her passion, which is palpable and undeniable.”—ALFRED CORN, author of Contradictions, (Copper Canyon Press)

“In poems touching, tough, and erotic, Laurie Wagner Buyer’s new collection explores the passion and pain of a woman’s journey into her sensuality and her quest for a partnership promising self-fulfillment on every level. Writing from a sensibility that is as feminine as it is unsentimental, she probes the deepest heart of women’s relationships—their turmoil, their tenderness and their wrenching fragility.”—KATHLENE SUTTON

THE GOAT’S EYELID

I.
Even after all these years I remember his eye,
gold and gloating as he pissed himself
and licked the sticky liquid off his front legs,
then chattered a blat that he believed
the does went for when really all they wanted
was six seconds of sex and his expensive sperm.
He smelled as rank as winter rotted hay
and gave no quarter to anyone who made
their way past his private pen. He glared
with gold eyes, oblong pupils black in the sun,
and lowering his horned head he butted every
mother’s child backwards through the fence.
In his sequestered space, I loved and hated him.

II.
Chinese Mongols of the Yiian dynasty
made ‘happy rings’ from the eye lids of dead goats:
leaving the eyelashes attached they placed the lids
in quick-lime, then carefully steamed and dried them
until they reached the right texture for sexual pleasure.
In the stillness of some 13th century summer night
a man carefully tied a dried eyelid onto his erect penis
so that it tickled and teased his lover during intercourse.
I wonder if the woman, arched and aching inside,
ever gave a thought to the gold eye that gave her sight.

III
I worship memory like some women worship wealth:
at times the buck’s scent haunts me as I clean my house,
how after feeding I could never scrub away his smell.
I hear his pleading bleat as the does headed out to graze
and how he stood all day with front feet on a rounded rock,
gold eye gazing, his thin black beard dripping fresh urine,
his long soft eyelashes blinking like a disbeliever.