Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony Part 3

I'm excited to see Anne Carson's latest collaborations, Stacks and Bracko, with sculptor Peter Cole and choreographer Jonah Bokaer. I've admired Carson's work-- The Glass Essay, Plainwater, Autobiography of Red and The Beauty of the Husband have been important. I return often to her translations of Sappho, If Not Winter, and Grief Lessons, four plays by Euripides. The reading/performance is to be staged at NYU later in the week.

listen

Amanda Palmer

thank you

Poetry

And it was at that age...Poetry arrived

in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where

it came from, from winter or a river.

I don't know how or when,

no they were not voices, they were not

words, nor silence,

but from a street I was summoned,

from the branches of night,

abruptly from the others,

among violent fires

or returning alone,

there I was without a face

and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth

had no way

with names,

my eyes were blind,

and something started in my soul,

fever or forgotten wings,

and I made my own way,

deciphering

that fire,

and I wrote the first faint line,

faint, without substance, pure

nonsense,

pure wisdom

of someone who knows nothing,

and suddenly I saw

the heavens

unfastened

and open,

planets,

palpitating plantations,

shadow perforated,

riddled,

with arrows, fire and flowers,

the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,

drunk with the great starry

void,

likeness, image of

mystery,

felt myself a pure part

of the abyss,

I wheeled with the stars,

my heart broke loose on the wind.

--Pablo Neruda

who I'm reading

Ruin

In the spider and on the web. On the branch

and in the pothole. Yellowed grass, wilted

fern, blackened growth. On the skeletal

stems of black-eyed Susans and in dawn's

stretch.  The glint of street lights. The sibilant

mulberry behind blinds.  Empty sky. Listen

to these old windows,

how they lend themselves to rattle.

Suzanne Frischkorn

from Lit Windowpane

The God Chain

Priest River, Idaho

Anchor sheen trout tulip under yellow wood flicks its goose aside,

holds hot the malediction kitchen march, oh marvelous me puddle

pulsing the river's run.  He speaks static, flicks the bristled coat and

ducklings disappear easier into every field's floor.  It is an arrow

bath clogging and cracking the code under the milk skirt snow.

Rebecca Loudon

from cadaver dogs

Two incredible books. Plus time spent roaming a swath of Woodlawn

Cemetary. Amazing statues. Lots of angels. Not every angel is demure or

holy, as Milton knew. 

check it out

My poem in

The Cortland Review

book

from Edmond Jabes
The Book of Margins

...as if all the truth transported by the book--this
portion of dark where the light wears thin--
were but an approach to death, for which
writing is both a piece of luck
and a misfortune; a death becomes ours
through every word, every letter, through sounds
and silence, where sense is only what makes
sense of the adventure.
As if, moreover, in order to make sense,
this adventure needed the deep sense of words,
their multiple meanings,
which are but focal points of their radiance.



The point here being that I've accumulated work enough for another book, dare I write this, world, whoever you are...and so the work begins again, with the point also being that there's sorting and re-reading and assemblage and revision/ new understandings--an adventure for sure--courage, roll up the sleeves.

fall

everywhere leaves, especially

if you live in the woods,

particularly with regard to oak,

last to let go, still holding on,

thus my free time is spent 

these days raking, blowing 

and dealing with leaves, 

everywhere

as they cling or fall

history

head shot

       by Mary Ruefle