Maxine Scates

Maxine Scates Poems

Maxine Scates Biography

Maxine Scates (Born 1949) is an American poet. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she received a B.A. in English from California State University, Northridge, where she studied with the poet, Ann Stanford, whose selected poems Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford she later co-edited with another former student of Stanford's, the poet David Trinidad. She moved to Eugene, Oregon in 1973 to pursue an M.F.A. which she received in 1975. She is the author of three books of poems, Undone(New Issues 2011), Black Loam (Cherry Grove, 2005) which received the Lyre Prize and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, andToluca Street (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), which received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and subsequently the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. She has taught throughout the state of Oregon, most recently at Reed College. Her poems have appeared in such journals as AGNI, American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Crab Orchard Review, Crazyhorse, Hubbub, Ironwood, Luna, Massachusetts Review, Missouri Review, North American Review, Oregon Literary Review, Ploughshares, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, The Virginia Quarterly Review,The Women's Review of Books, and ZYZZYVA. She lives in Eugene, Oregon and is married to William Cadbury.)

The Best Poem Of Maxine Scates

Last

At dusk the streetlights
stand like beacons to the underworld,
a girl runs toward me beaded with rain
and sweat. I think husk, wheels—
seeds rattle, shake loose and a candle
is held to the egg's red mass she is
too young to see. In Pompeii those bodies
are not bodies but plaster poured
into the cavity where a body once lay,
no less a hand pushing back ash,
no less a woman with her unborn child
twisting for a pocket of air,
the forge, the fire, the glimpsed blade,
a door we close quickly, just as my brother
said Now I know I will die, and I thought
of course and not me in the same second.
We kept driving, arrived at the airport
and the next day our father did die—
aria, the birds rising at the sound
of the explosion and plums, succulent
ashy, burnished. Walking down the Spanish
Steps on a Sunday morning in October,
no one there yet, Keats' window open,
you said Ten or fifteen years from now
when I am gone, come back. You touched
our absence from each other,
the fifteen years ahead you've always had—
when in dreams I am older and you
remain as you were when we first met,
before devotion was returned,
or was it that I let it be—our lives together
suddenly recognizable as if seared pages
fallen from a larger book.

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