These are lyrical and witty poems about change and cultural evolution from an intellectual and insightful mind. In this collection, Ragan's musings prompt him to explore the historicity in man's cultural and mythical identities - from Prehistory, in which he muses on the "Birth of God (from an Early Photograph)" and "The Pebble Culture," when our distant ancestors turned "violence into culture," to the New World, where he covers such topics as Tuzla, the inner city, and the construction of a city mall. Once he catches up to the Premillennium, Ragan's poems are overwhelmed by a return to nature, perhaps the only antidote to our electronic age. (Amazon Review)

Table of Poems:

Anniversary Of A Roman Arch
Antiques
The Astonishment Of Living
August 19, 1991
Beckett Had Only One Student
The Birth Of God (from An Early Photograph)
Birthing A Daughter Into The Holcene Epoch
Blueprints For A Mall
The Board Of Selectmen
The Burghers Of Calais, 1347
The Buttered Toast Mystery
Delacroix And The Organ At St. Sulpice
Delivering Newspapers Past The Cemetery Dead
The Dogs Of China
Dreaming Of Flood Of Conscience
Epitaph To The Plumber Of Westminster Abbey
The Eskimo's Twelve Expressions Of White
For Three Twelve-year-old Homeboys
History
The Holy Ghost As Eighth Grader
An Immigrant Playing Violin In The Neighbor Wood
The Invention Of Horsebrass
Lines Of Succession
Lusions
Madame Rimsky-korsakov: Peinture At The Musee
D'orsay
The Margin Of Error
The Mayor Boils A Speck Of Dust
Myth And The Higher Orders Of Abstraction
On Mowing A Lawn
The Pebble Culture
Perizoma: On Striking Michelangelo's Signature From
The Piet
The Pit Fall
Poem To The Photograph Of A Found Daughter
The Refugees Of Tuzla
The Reindeer Age
Rilke On The Conveyor Belt At Los Angeles
International
The Tombs Of Pechora
Two Kinds Of Darkness
The Vineyards At Bar Sur Aube
The Warehouse Of Apostrophe S's
The Water Wheel
We Stop The Universe With Study
The Willow Father

From Lusions:

Section IV
COLLUSION
In the Age of Atoms

Poem to the Photograph of a Found Daughter
TO DEBORA

Neither of you knew
that behind you on the white
hills in the photograph I took
the day after snow,

a fire was building on a cloud,
and the figure of a child, young Helen,
lost when the spring rains broke
and lured her brothers to German skies,

came forward on her sled, play-tired.
I remember her miles down the road
of Goldstrohm Lane before the cows were shed
and chickens loped, headless, along

father's hatchet rail. She'd twist
her glider rope, fist-tight, and with a running
start, angling down to speed,
fire that Rocket sled to earth

then breathe, feverishly, all the ride down
to the bottom of its glide. All my life
through six years old and cliffs of snow,
I've tunneled to retrieve her broken breath.

The August day she slept through
breakfast, play, and noon,
I promised her in bed, white and wreathed,
I'd bring the winter back. I promised her

a passage dog to spring. Photographs
I have learned to trust for their accuracy
and sisters for their running speed
and memory only for the truth

it hides in what we never see—Hiroshima.
Nothing is salvageable, found daughter,
angling home, clinging, fist-tight, and play-tired
to one more winter on your Rocket sled.