Monday, July 31, 2006

Love

How about love? First, think Rumi, for whom you will find many links and who articulates explorations of love with a passion that is exquisite, especially for those of us who conflate love and spirit. Rumi was as in love with God as he was with the world and its peoples and a person, to all accounts. I think perhaps he would have been surprised to find himself so popular in post-modernist North America, where God gets short shrift and spirit is suspect as a place of muse. Do I generalize? Very well, then, I generalize.

Today I refer you to the Atlantic poet, Anne Compton. I find myself seduced by the simplicity of her work. You'll think you're in a narrative poem ("Trees in Summer", from Processional, for example) and then you're blindsided by a line like "The ocean loosens something in us. We step out and for a moment,/anything's possible." Or shortly thereafter, "Desire speaks the numeration of air. We have no words for this./Only the lesser sounds." Where are the trees of the title? Right there in the poem, along ruminations that "...we are small beneath the branching."

Yes. For me, this is not the summer of trees. It is the summer of sunflowers, of blueberries, of too many tomatoes on the vine, something to prop up, something of wonder. Like Compton's poem, I feel "The square root of bliss beneath our feet."

I glance from the corner of myopic eyes and glimpse, a sense of spirit, quiet bliss in ground, on hands and knees, feel my bones become petrified stone, desire to be a fossil.

First, life.

Sunday, July 30, 2006

Another poem accepted...

I am delighted to learn today that one of my poems has been accepted for the winter edition of Room of One's Own.

Saturday, July 29, 2006

Home is Where My Poem Is

Inspired by rob mclennan, Amanda Earl, Jennifer Mulligan, and Pearl Pirie, I begin a more public poetic journey. How better than to start with some new writing...

landfall

Why do I need a secondary process translation to find out what I, myself, am thinking?

Jan Zwicky


a wind: zephyr, chinook, mistral, call it what you will. breeze,
waited scent, wafted. blown. who has seen it?

ill wind, come with wind, or gone.
we try to leave land, then return:
sea and air, our temporary homes, abandoned on a whimsy.
charade.

seeking discovery, we find no answers
in tall catamarans of our minds.
like flying fish, landborne birds,
we spin wheels, tilt windmills
till next apocalypse.

it’s a breeze: draft, breath. Who breathes? slow
currents compose to gales, angered gods whistle,
propel blasts through constituent parts. oxygenation.
a petal drifts through heat haze of summer afternoon
hotter than hell has ever been.

a distant promontory, a mirage. all our senses
shift to cardinal directions. we watch birds soar
as land is sighted, light upon it wishfully.
homecomings are not for strangers.

how do we name? language borrows other places,
sundial turns to shadow. butterfly wings cause tidal wave.
some small miracle, somewhere, longing sailed round islands,
sun and wind. global warming.

restless denizens in each firmament chase seedlings
along chaotic pathways. nothing is random: no maps can find location.
predestinations. gentle prestidigitations from quiescent gods:
a new garden, a tree, leaf blown, a sail.

dervish twirls a dance, no demons follow. land ho, he cries,
and there, truth of windfall. sand. ephiphany?

something true is known. we feel that much, twirl again, skirts
lifted to umbrella air, sea creatures bound for planetary credenzas,
aloft like helium. endure, tarry,
remember invisible space, immanence.

a sign of someone coming.