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Michael Ryan's New and Selected Poems is just out from Houghton Mifflin. Baby B, a memoir, will be published by Graywolf in May. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of California, Irvine.

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Tutelary
by Michael Ryan

What a fuckup you are.
What dumbshit you do.
Your father's voice
still whispers in you,

despite the joys
that sweeten each day.
Your Genius it isn't
until, dying away,

it worms back through
the sparkling dream
where you drown him
in an inch-deep stream:

your knee in his back,
your strength on his skull,
it begins singing
praise for your skill.

 
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