My posting about poetry from a few days ago (see April 1 below) drew some thoughtful and insightful responses. Here’s one from my dear friend and gifted poet Nicole that deserves highlighting up front. There are two thoughts I have regarding your posting on poetry today. As an instructor at a historically black college, I […]
Poetry
To be Opened
A Green Crab’s Shell Not, exactly, green: closer to bronze preserved in kind brine, something retrieved from a Greco-Roman wreck, patinated and oddly muscular. We cannot know what his fantastic legs were like– though evidence suggests eight complexly folded scuttling works of armament, crowned by the foreclaws’ gesture of menace and power. A gull’s gobbled […]
Unnoticed, and Necessary
Variation On The Word Sleep I would like to watch you sleeping, which may not happen. I would like to watch you, sleeping. I would like to sleep with you, to enter your sleep as its smooth dark wave slides over my head and walk with you through that lucent wavering forest of bluegreen leaves […]
Still Standing
I am not a poet. But I turn to poetry instinctively to navigating the inner life. As a painter I have given myself a hall pass to not have to chip away at language in an attempt to replicate, resuscitate or reconstitute those intense experiences that happen outside the domain of language. Outside my domain […]
Music of Hair, Music of Pain
Wait (to someone contemplating suicide) Wait, for now. Distrust everything, if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven’t they carried you everywhere, up to now? Personal events will become interesting again. Hair will become interesting. Pain will become interesting. Buds that open out of season will become lovely again. Second-hand gloves will become lovely […]
The Nature of Happiness
Morning Poem Every morning the world is created. Under the orange sticks of the sun the heaped ashes of the night turn into leaves again and fasten themselves to the high branches — and the ponds appear like black cloth on which are painted islands of summer lilies. If it is your nature to be […]
Bones to Emeralds
The Jewel There is this cave In the air behind my body That nobody is going to touch: A cloister, a silence Closing around a blossom of fire. When I stand upright in the wind, My bones turn to dark emeralds. James Wright Thank you Whiskey River for another diamond hard hit to the deeper […]
Jane Mayhall: The Endlesss Window-Sky
Jane Mayhall died on March 17 at the age of 90. Her most recent volume of poems, Sleeping Late on Judgment Day, her first full-length collection, was published when she was 85 years old. This poem is one of several she wrote about the inconsolable sorrow of love following the death of her husband died […]
Nizar Qabbani
Friend and fellow artist George Wingate sent me this link to The Writer’s Almanac this morning. I can always count on George to spot the worthwhile and the memorable, with his eye and ear in full immersion with life. Thanks George, especially since Qabbani is one of those non-Western poets whose work lands fresh on […]
Leslie Harrison: How I Became a Ghost
How I Became a Ghost It was all about objects, their objections expressed through a certain solidity. My house for example still moves through me, moves me. When I tried to reverse the process I kept dropping things, kept finding myself in the basement. Windows became more than usually problematic. I wanted to break them […]