WomanWyrds

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.

posted by Heather Cardin @ 12:10 PM