Emily Strauss - 2
A Poetry of Placein such a poem, the voice
present indigenous, the always of a furrowed trunk of gray bark, a native belonging here in such a poem momentary details can be distorted by global climate anomalies induced by our mastery of god, a hurried time-lapse development. I've lost control now, forfeit my surety, this elegy, false, in a scene painted too nicely even as I sit here, somewhere watching an old bird feather skitter in the wind. This is some place, anonymous, this is a real wind, alive, not a pretty view but I will miss it. I'm keeping the present, cottonwood trunk, fluttering dead leaves, keeping this place splayed on white paper, a museum, a specimen. InertiaIn the city of restless souls
in the stone-paved square next to gelato vendors dozing in the late afternoon heat thick-set women shuffle out of the cathedral where they go at 3 PM after washing the sidewalks, passing dusty sleeping dogs. They pause a few moments to tally their onyx rosary beads with moving lips. Around the side of the church yard, behind a crumbling wall splashed red with lichen lies the city of the dead, comforted by a fountain of Saint Francis holding his urn, surrounded by tidy borders of ancient Eglantine roses in profusion. Swallows swoop from beneath the thick beams, just graze the granite grave stones lying askew. How close these two cities lie. Their sidewalk smells and leafy humus both alive with death-defying fecundity counter all the inertia that roots us firmly to the ground on either side of the wall, staring at the other half. Writing at Dawnmemory recalls--
scenes reaching out of silence fragments lodged between pauses this yearning to keep pictures from melting away like knowing by heart the shapes of sculpted canyons after a ruby sunset has flared out ghost shadows flooding the plain when the full moon rises and you follow the trail past sheer walls remembered-- later setting down glimpses of sky and smells until the view clarifies and stills elements of perspective resolve as the night gives way to cool rocks at dawn-- writing faster |
Appropriated Lessonspoets stress over a single word--
the single word— the definite or indefinite, writing about nothing, or something worse-- obscurity, what can't be expressed, a paradox found here or there. Meaning only arises coincidentally, not with what is stated but how, a reconfiguration of bits, a rhythm of a throbbing heart— this is what poets stress, the strain of the ear. As if penetrated, poets push back into the flesh of sounds spoken aloud, but seldom talk of empathy, about understanding soft hands-- this is missing from the hard silhouette of a dark ridge, stark lines full of thunder rolling, the beat of rain, that heartbeat of definite words, that rhythm of breath. Moon Light ☊Through the skylight
the full moon splashes gray-white opalescence not a new task— every month it rises roundly yellow against the liquid amber and white oak landscaping or steel towers of power lines across the mud flats at low tide with the distant lights on the bare hills shining across the bay every month is not a new thing, we may count on its regular appearance like a dream of a lover returning recurring a loss that never leaves this its white reminder, the round face of what we must remember or are forbidden to forget so we need to notice every time, even as we forget his face exactly now, and his arms-- the moon feels colder these days through the electric wires the plane trees the skylight on my single bed. |
