mapping the nest
Greg Spalenka Divinus : Tentative Futures : You try to forgive words their push and pull. In the garden, the cherry tree has sprouted buds, each one enveloping a heartbeat. You lean against the trunk, listening to the hum under its bark, remembering what it was like to carry that same echo deep in the... Continue Reading →
Dominique Appia Entre les trous de la memoire / Between the Holes in the Memory : Forecast : It can always be worse: what you cling to could be a ledge over a subterranean river or a bridge tucked away in a sentence no one can read. Each memory— a shattered puzzle. It could be... Continue Reading →
Rene Magritte Explanation I wrote this poem years ago during a writing exercise in graduate school, while pregnant with my first child. Reading E. T. A. Hoffman's Gothic stories around that time may have had something to do with that foreboding ending... : Poem for a Green Bottle and a Candle Held Together with Tape... Continue Reading →
Edvard Munch The Scream : Fear : It never goes away, it only diminishes, thins out like a bookmark you forget in one of the books you now rarely read. Then you find it while dusting one day. It springs out voluptuous, huge—this bosomy aunt who always arrives out of nowhere to stay, suitcases... Continue Reading →
Millicent Sowerby Wee Willie Winkie : Wee Willie Winkie : Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town, Upstairs and downstairs, in his nightgown. Rapping at the window, crying through the lock, “Are the children all in beds? Now it’s eight o’clock.” ... Continue Reading →
Leonard Myburgh Airbrushed Lion Courtesy of lonehillart.com : The Lion : Every angel is terrifying. ~ Rilke He comes in the dark, breaks doors, muscles his way through windows. His wings wrap around my heart like sin. His words run through my... Continue Reading →
Gerard Gauci Scene from "Armide" at the Palace of Versailles Image courtesy of operaatelier.com : Spectator : I’ll always be part of an audience— not the worst crowd to melt in, though observers are often portrayed as distant, uninvolved. I, too, am an observer. I watch the plot thicken and flare up toward denouement, and... Continue Reading →
Winter sky over Lausanne, Switzerland : The Photograph : It doesn’t matter what we should have argued about. Talking was something we couldn't or wouldn't do. We walked through a meadow instead, you slightly ahead and I taking pictures of things I wanted to remember, including that bloody sunset. The flowers parted before... Continue Reading →
N. C. Wyeth Rip Van Winkle : Rip Van Winkle In the evening she sits on the couch. The sunset starts a fire around her head, like a halo. She reads and her hair streams down in black coils past her waist, past her knees. It hesitates when it reaches the floor, but... Continue Reading →
Image courtesy of Alan Harris via hiveminer.com : Murder in the Orchard : Nobody wants to handle the dead bird, its beak cracked as an omen. We read a tear, or is it only the implacable glass of the eye, watching? None of us comes even near the limp body in the dirt. We circle... Continue Reading →
Migrating Snow Geese in Pennsylvania Photo courtesy of WabbyTwaxx via Birdshare : Migration : When the season ends, we flock South to the house of unfinished poems. Tired birds, we crowd in its rooms. Though close enough, our wings barely touch. They sweep the dust off the floor, the cobwebs off the ceiling. We have never tasted... Continue Reading →
Image courtesy of http://www.napowrimo.net/ The Date (Notes to Self) Calm, cool, and collected, Poetry knocks at your door. I know you want to let him in. You should--no argument from me. But firstly, there are some things you might want to consider before cracking the door open and gazing into those dreamy eyes. That fireplace you... Continue Reading →
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.org “Beauty like that is strength. […] One could turn the world upside down with beauty like that.” ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky “The Idiot” This page is dedicated to the work of human spirit: the things that feed our soul, keep us warm, make us grow. A brooding bird will often pluck its own... Continue Reading →
Image courtesy of www.stevegettle.com A good part of my childhood was spent in my grandmother’s village, where I grew up believing that the mud nests the swallows built under our eaves brought us good luck. More swallow nests meant better luck. I remember the joy when yet another swallow family would choose to raise its young under... Continue Reading →
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. ~ William Blake My neighbors are temporarily storing a barn door in the hallway of our apartment building. It’s intricately carved, iron-studded, worn by wind, rain, the hands of several generations of farmers. I dare not ask why... Continue Reading →
Photo by Tim Laman Speaking for the Trees : This page is an homage to things in nature that nourish a poet’s imagination: the roots and moss of poetry that contemplates, accepts, and embraces. So where does one start mapping this nest? Where does the glossary of tangible symbols that permeate a poet’s work begin?... Continue Reading →
Image courtesy of www.littleterns.org Poets throughout history have turned to animal and mineral being to express their own because from that storehouse a larger vocabulary of being, particularity, and wisdom can emerge. ~ Jane Hirshfield “Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry” Some poems are pebbles and some are sand. This sounds like the beginning of... Continue Reading →
