Category: studio

From no nowhere not near the sea
on blue field flax
the cemetery's absolutely solitary
you and you and a third

of a pound of bread
for supper in the refectory
where I would die of hunger
if you--if soon--if on this unday--one

undoing would be undone

Unday, Fanny Howe

What is poetry? Is it a mosaic 
Of coloured stones which curiously are wrought 
Into a pattern? Rather glass that’s taught 
By patient labor any hue to take 
And glowing with a sumptuous splendor, make 
Beauty a thing of awe; where sunbeams caught, 
Transmuted fall in sheafs of rainbows fraught 
With storied meaning for religion’s sake. 

Fragment, Amy Lowell

We two, how long we were fool’d,
Now transmuted, we swiftly escape as Nature escapes,
We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return,
We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark,
We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks,
We are oaks, we grow in the openings side by side,
We browse, we are two among the wild herds spontaneous as any,
We are two fishes swimming in the sea together,
We are what locust blossoms are, we drop scent around lanes mornings and evenings,
We are also the coarse smut of beasts, vegetables, minerals,
We are two predatory hawks, we soar above and look down,
We are two resplendent suns, we it is who balance ourselves orbic and stellar, we are as two comets,
We prowl fang’d and four-footed in the woods, we spring on prey,
We are two clouds forenoons and afternoons driving overhead,
We are seas mingling, we are two of those cheerful waves rolling over each other and interwetting each other,
We are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive, pervious, impervious,
We are snow, rain, cold, darkness, we are each product and influence of the globe,
We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two,
We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy.

We Two, How Long We Were Fool’d, Walt Whitman

Wild Nights – Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile – the winds –
To a heart in port –
Done with the compass –
Done with the chart!

Rowing in Eden –
Ah, the sea!
Might I moor – Tonight –
In thee!

Wild Nights—Wild Nights! (249), Emily Dickinson

I chart the psyche,
observing how I 
force myself to speak
to you, imagining that
together we might
transform a life.  

Why this need
to document change,
to reverse a mood, 
to carry forward the time
when magnolias bloom?

Let’s follow the itinerant we
up and over the jonquil’s back,
treading on its spilled bullion.

April, Sally Van Doren

(The essay on modesty) (in application for) (bodily autonomy)

          (She lost that case) (on (wide is the gate))  (rhetorically memorable)

                        (Arbiter rise)

(Attracted to) (the most minor) (advantages) (adopting gendered props)

          (Assaying willingness)                       (I notice a certain scarlet letter)

(Dream of a house) (it can’t be mine) (vast roominess)

                        (Dream of a beach) (but it’s a beach with a                 problem)

          (In the smug of your (natural woman))               (I have had (a stain) (a conceit))

                                    (Despite appearances (allegedly))

          (A medical person) (declares the injury a                                     non-emergency)

(The essay on modesty), Krystal Languell

And isn’t everything risk?

The beloved lives 
Then dies,
Then (if we’re lucky) 
Rises again 
Into a poem or song

Or into the world 
In some other form 
Impossible to predict.

Simplest story, oldest tale: 

Sparrows sing it
From every hedge;

And swallows, also, 
From their nests on the ledge. 

[And isn’t everything risk?], Gregory Orr