Echoes and Links Poems Published by Blade of Grass Press, 2014 Paperback, 199 pages Also in Kindle version Click here to order. |
These are vivid, seriously crafted poems culled from decades of work by a writer entering her seventies. Whimsical, personal, meditative, abstract, lyrical, narrative; the accessible and the difficult; the short and the long: here is a cornucopia, echoing and linking as it spills into the reader's lap.
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"This morning I was thinking about your poetry,
which reminds me of extremely fine and strong filaments of tensile steel."
—Christina Diebold, poet and friend of the author
which reminds me of extremely fine and strong filaments of tensile steel."
—Christina Diebold, poet and friend of the author
From the author's Preface:
There are many of us: we write for decades, take extreme care, produce good work—even work that is unique—and do not become "known." I think of us as the invisible portion of the iceberg, the large and necessary base. Without us no one would see those jagged overpowering white peaks of ice, those mind-altering and suitably famous works of poetry. This idea might not withstand the scrutiny of a logician but metaphors, free beings that they are, are allowed to produce irrational, even comforting, effects. Sometimes we, the invisible, thrust ourselves upward—out of the water, into bright air—for a moment. Here is my moment. It began when I turned seventy... |
Sample poems from Echoes and Links:
Something Pulled at Me Farm smells disturbed my mother. She hated the chickens, their dirtied eggs, shit on the floor of the coop. Worse than that their bloodied necks, the ax in her hand. She determined a course for herself: up the rope that dangled, tantalizing, from clouds; the rope an immaculate construction of words, sentences, paragraphs to be grasped one by one, hand over hand, until, at the higher altitudes, they became ideas; beauty, truth, being; respect. Somewhere above the clouds: respect. If ever the clouds end: respect. I myself was raised as cleanly as possible, ignorant of crop dirt and animal perversities, a town girl in farm country. The smells of my childhood were print smells-- paper, ink, books, the uncontaminated dust of libraries. Also incense, candles, clean priest smells. Nothing, however, is perfect. On Sundays in the pew ahead of us sat a farmer. He reeked of garlic sausage. From Introit to Final Benediction: my poor mother: garlic sausage. At eighteen I climbed into the convent like a child coming home to bed at night. The upper bunk, clean sheets, one blanket. The rope of braided abstraction was firm in my hands. At twenty-three, still wrapped and veiled, I had first sex. Do not imagine here lust springing out, a jack-in-the-box, a sudden exit. Do not imagine a figure dancing free and naked away from catechism pages, Sunday sermons, the strict gaze of the Novice Mistress. Do not imagine even a tired seeker emerging with satisfaction from the final tunnel of the terrible maze of the Summa Theologica, her body carried sweetly alive in her exhausted arms. We went, avoiding boards that creaked, down midnight halls to narrow beds and let our long white nightgowns touch. Some nights we kissed. On wild and rare occasion, hands were let loose. My sex that year was like the first thin juices of creation. Squeezed from nothing, pale, and of uncertain flavoring, still, it was a sort of scrawny miracle, a fact. My sex, unlikely, inappropriate, existed. If there was a map for going on from there, I didn't know it. Something pulled at me, weak as a toddler's hand with a distracted mother and I followed with my body, half my mind, and large unclear intentions. We went gathering, my little sex and I, through a stretch of rounded common coming over years, through rough dry nights and silken places bright with red or hushing down to pleasure blue, through quirky growth whose brambles rolled at last to merely texture adding interest. We collected smells and all available varieties of touch. We picked the fruit of language and community. We grew a history. Life took me to an island and to chickens. Yes, chickens. Predictably, their shit was copious. It waited, silent, under the long clothes line on laundry days. It offered itself, apparently innocent, even generous, to the deeply indented soles of my shoes; and stank when squashed. I thought of the young Harriet, my mother, forced to farm. But there was Ginny, who smells so good to me, sitting down beside the chicken house she built and watching by the gentle evening light her chickens. Over months I learned: that there is comedy and tragedy in chicken life, adventure, duty, pride, and social strife; that eggs are individual, small from a hen who lacks practice, sometimes speckled, sometimes such a smooth brown sculpture in the hand that contemplation, not eating, is wanted; that even the ridiculous chicken shape, splayed feet, pin head, serves the eye if sunlight strikes the blue-black feathers and a prism-split of color leaps into the air. Then the whole brain, held and human, opens-- lit-- and laughs to find itself—well--chicken-blessed. Ginny If someone were to fall into intimate slumber, and slept deeply with Things—: how easily he would come to a different day, out of the mutual depth. —Rainer Maria Rilke In the clear mirror of our long years together I see my early morning lover, showered, bending to search out a shirt, a pair of pants to wear to work. She's nude. She's on the verge of sixty. She's shaped and lined by time, and, damn, she's lovely. It's vigorous and individual—unexpected— this beauty she's come into lately. Earned. "I had an intimate relationship with that one." She means a piece of firewood, larger, stranger than the others; more challenging. "I remember it." She's thinking how it lay outdoors; how she took it to the woodshed, stacked it. It wasn't easy but she got it in the stove just now. It's burning well, making heat and lively light quite like my love herself. Before we slept together-- but my soul already knew-- I dreamed she played an oboe, whole, the sound of all the beauty and the being of the world. In recent years, centered on the stone of duty like a sacrifice whose ritual extends itself beyond the sacred, separate time—whose very length has layered on the daily, the unlovely, the unnoticed—the music breaks, begins again, stretches into octaves where the skew and pitch are new—and difficult to my less knowing, less acute, less loving ear. But lately I prefer—this is as unexpected as her recent beauty--prefer this tested denser stranger music, the changing keys, the raw disharmonies, and resolutions that unmake themselves, abandon easy pleasure for what's harsher, less familiar. Prefer. And love to see her intimate with wood, a forked odd piece of simple firewood, a Thing whose progress over time she's watched and felt a kinship with, as she feels kinship with a multitude of things—things too particular, too troublesome, perhaps too real for me. How she takes on the world! How she wrestles with the Real and brings it home to me! The dogs and cats and firewood, the house forever worked on, and the elders: everlasting fine old folk who pull virtue from the fiber of the soul, twisting strands together, making thread and pattern-- it's a huge, old-fashioned tapestry she's got us all creating now, a mythic story slowly woven from the long plain humble threads that—yes—do shimmer on occasion like a new note found, pulled from an ancient instrument, perhaps an oboe, as in an archetypal dream. Theater of Cruelty: February, 2010 April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. —T. S. Eliot I've been reading Derrida on Artaud's Theater of Cruelty: "the affirmation / of a terrible / and, moreover, implacable necessity." Don't worry if you haven't read Derrida on Artaud, the point is: February is the cruelest month. When your lover's father takes a fall the lilacs won't even be dreaming of stirring their roots, dull or not. They like their little underground life, the winter routine with its permissions: to forego striving, to forget. Then comes the tumble, and temps above normal. All night in the ER. All life in the glare. Premature change of season. The windshield layers itself with a constant thick wet sheen. Rain seeps into the cellar. Dread creeps into the soul. Heaps of it. He's only 99 and he was fine. And now he's not. But the affirmation: "affirmation itself in its full and necessary rigor." They want to pull us, these cruel theorists, these affirmers, beyond the whine to willing, whipped, raw nakedness; the mask of knowing, stripped; the featureless face, exposed. He's innocent now of everything. Sudden infancy follows the fall. Some days the old Victorian upright professor returns, an intelligent nod; but that's the mask. Familiar, that mask, a relief to see, no matter that we've seen also behind it, glimpsed the skin of the soul, tender and terrifying with its virtual completions, its inevitable beginnings. Which alterations we strive to affirm. Dry Strictly speaking, God does not love anyone. —Baruch Spinoza We prefer moisture. This is understandable. Even our bones are 22% water. Blood: 83%. And no one these days wants a dry soul. "Spiritual dryness" yields 63,100 Google hits. How to avoid sere days and sere nights. How to endure if struck by such. Or tunnel through, emerge as quickly as possible; at blessedness. But what of Heraclitus? Fire is best, said he. The drier the soul, the better. I have always liked this radical guy. Besides, I'm weary of salty streams leaking. Perhaps I'm just old. Spinoza's dry God, who doesn't gush, who simply exists yet can't resist incessant creativity, burns the barriers. Out of Nyx Deathless gods draw near, wrapped in Sleep. Death, the other, heart of iron, pitiless as bronze, once seized, holds fast. And there, all in their order, are the sources and the ends. Night and day greet one another and the house holds them both and waits until the time. All-seeing light, the glowing Sun comes down and roams peacefully and the sea's broad back is kindly even to the gods. Note: Out of Nyx is an "erasure poem" derived from Hesiod's Theogony, lines 736-766 As the Field Is Revealed —after Ellen Goldsmith's "Before the Curtain" The great gap stretching from soul to sight shall be lit; the thing itself, though at present encased like body and blind head inside muscle, inside bone, shall be sudden seen unless revelation smear the wet ink, one large hand swipe the page, douse the light, and deep night take all. For All My Cherished Suicides Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people. —Sylvia Plath I forgive you everything and there is nothing to forgive. —Gertrude Stein I must be standing on land. Perhaps it's even daytime for me. They, cut-out humans in their black boat on their black lake, crossing the waters of essential night, are far from me, safely clear. Don't you safely see them, clear despite pervasive dark? It's only a mythic image, nothing to do with now, bits of thick paper cut by a child, two-dimensional. Isn't it? Oh, Sylvia! I forgive you everything and there is indeed nothing to forgive. Dear Gertrude, please understand the rest of us. Lacking genius, we nevertheless appreciate your lines. This one is a good one, it lets us stand everywhere at once. We like that. Lines Lines straight as light, you have seen light, seen it escaping the cloud's edge, reaching. Lines like that, all the way to your own eternity and not always invisible. The proper cloud, the specific slant, renders them-- offerings-- visible. Even the human eye then sees. Ignore shame at the leavings of the former self; bypass, delete. Delete not the leavings but the shame. Shame will break and tangle the lines, knot them wrongly, distort the design. As for the leavings: find a tender half-smile for them, left in the path as they are. Stop, stoop, pick up. See how contained, how definite, each moment a shy self. Put it down carefully. Carefully do not step on it. Turn next to the straight line, longed-for, claimed. The line to your own eternity. See the fine, thin, available reach of it, outward, inward, how it remains and escapes, how it freshens itself, how patient it has been. |