dear lorine,
after reading you so, i've decided some things. you have won
my love with your lily mud, your muskrats and birdstart, your weight of lake
water. the granite pail grace of words you tumble down the page like
stone-skipping, outflow flood, or like pouring your eyes out into folded, and i
am cranberry bush, cupped paper palms waiting.
your pressure-pump is water-bird and i drew a small heart
near that. and your father's trees and your mother's ropes and the road are
what you know. you talk about the plumbing. about the oven. fishpole &
leafbloom. that beautiful poem last (about louis?) that dwindles in everything~ down and down until it's nothing or mine.
red mars / rising
.
i'm writing this in a letter because how can i not. it's the
only rightly quiet thing to do, me & you.
what to do, watching the birds.
i was in the grass with the book and i kept writing things
like alliteration. and slant-rhyme. and "sound"."sound"."sound". there was
sun and a swirl of film-thin clouds and writing those sorts of things makes me
tired. my toes sifting pine needles i wanted to write about "she who knew boats and ropes".
i want to write "you
have been on my mind / between my toes / agate" or "leafing towards you / in this
dark / deciduous hall". i could write "Rock = Blood / Nature = Body / Body = Compost?" i could
write, "sound. pace." or "image & sound." but i want to
write everything else, your "sweet cedar pink", the "July, waxwings" and "the little / thin things /
paul". i want to write "spoon-tapped water glass", a "strawberry
letter" and "you weed / you pea-blossom weed / in a folk / field". i
want to write that your heart was flooded and you measured it out in
thimblefuls, careful, spelling out in pinches, dashes, delicate as to not spill
any excess on the page. that you were wedded to the worms and the water in the
ground.
maybe you held the papers there by their trees, in the
light. maybe you were content or lonesome. maybe you saw yourself only as a
reflection in a lake. silver minnows, sharp and swallows darting in your eyes.
.
onomatopoeia
noun
the formation of
a word from a sound associated with what is named
(e.g.,
cuckoo,
sizzle).
• the use of such words for rhetorical
effect
.
onomatopoetic, ey, i don't know how to say that. do you? the
pronunciation doesn't translate fonts. it's written in the right font of
Gertrude or Marisa, the wrong font of everyone knows this strange word and you can't
remember it what's the matter with you, but i'm pasting it for us
into my crumpled scrap paper-bit basket in the small font of pearl-flowered, your
maples to swing from / pewee glissando /
sublime / slime / song. you can hold me at the distance
of an arm, or a pond, or a thick winter window patterned with frost, keep me
there evenly, even with your I but
the sound smoothes out the reaches, pull us together like a bent green branch.
a pine bough. the handle for a basket. "Get a load / of April's /
fabulous / / frog rattle / lowland freight cars / in the night".
wandering in your head, wondering
your island, your blood-heart rustles like leaves.
"descending
scale / tear-drop-tittle / did she giggle / as a girl?"
( took
a lifetime
to weep
a deep
trickle )
.
as a girl, i found a picture of you dressed up like
Pocahontas. you had two thick blonde braids with ends jagged as horse-tails,
shimmery twisted like the surface of a lake from underwater. you stood there, timeless
on your island, laughing in black and white with the big grey sky behind you.
caught in that catching a moment, like a fish. "if in danger, run," you say in
silence of smiling, "to
the woods."
.
Pound's definition of the
image was "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex
in an instant of time." Pound defined the tenets of Imagist poetry as:
I. Direct treatment of the
"thing," whether subjective or objective.
II. To use absolutely no word that does not
contribute to the presentation.
III. As regarding rhythm:
to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not
in sequence
of the metronome.
pale and sharp, my pencil in the margin. your reflections
reflected in musings down the page.
a glossy blade of grass, split.
my life by water
i've wasted my life in water, you said
i've
spent my life on nothing
my
life is hung up / in the flood
.
( "the solitary plover / a pencil / for a wing-bone" )
.
.
quiet in isolation. quiet because some seasons shift in silence.
quiet like island are quiet. like the mud and collected fallen-things at the
bottom of a lake are quiet. quiet like an old faded painting of yourself with
bare trees and water behind you. quiet in lines dangled in space, like watching
fish faint submarine back & forth between the murk and surface of the pond, "lilacs, vacant lots," your white the gulls / in grey weather, your pouring wine over
cabbage. lakewater lap and leaf rustle. hold your pencil like a reed, a wand.
wait for letters, weather, hush.
.
Sleep on horseback,
The far moon in a continuing dream,
Steam of roasting tea.
-Basho
Matsuo
.
.
the publisher turned your volume
up. i know about the low levels of sound, round-about way of whispering when no
one's around. here i write you small how you belong. down in the good dirt and
the hiding with him in the cupboard. the language of a lake and a forest. the
language of the brown and golden underbrush. the language of long division
between sun and shadowing branches. twig-piled nests folded into the elbows of
your father's trees. these things we carry. here i quote your small and quiet,
your mousing through a crack in the wall with "the you
/ ah you / of mourning doves".
.
In a Station of
the Metro
The
apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals
on a wet, black bough.
-Ezra Pound
.
"I
learned / to sit at desk / and condense" you said. condensing
moments to their essentials, push your pencil at the essence of a moment – like
a secret – taking a moment and unlocking it like the flat door of a box –
looking to see the particular shape of its heart. letting out a little, the
breath of it. breathing. the breath of birds filling in the white space that
surrounds you. an antique looking-glass on the dresser. a lunar moth hidden in
plain sight on a doorframe.
.
autobiography of voice or stitched together like:
my mother, thorn apple bush
my father catalpa tree
I rose from marsh mud
I'm swamp / as against a large pine-spread
I
raped by the dry
weed stalk
a weedy speech / a marshy
retainer
a
wave-blurred portrait
sit for two months on six lines / of poetry
I was
job-certified / to rake leaves
something in the water
like a flower
in blood the minerals
of the rock
Fish
fowl
flood
Water lily mud
My
life
