Featured Poet
( Abingdon, Virginia )
static light and quickening heart when you saw the frescoed face, her parted lips calling through the cloistered calm suddenly imagined words: come, come quickly! or how a trumpet taunted time, its predictable plod, with high-stepping dance-hall notes that skipped and pirouetted among the ranks of dead; or the pulse of wing-pumped air when a hawk rose, pigeon talloned to its breast, rose inches from your startled, clumsy soul; or dirt’s tang tasted in a strawberry plucked from a wild-sown tapestry stitched across a green expanse long since dense with condos; or how you dreamed The Song of Songs then woke alone to silent dark that cupped desire like a grail, ever filling, never filled.
This poem was a bit of a stretch for me, and not just the long—too long?—lines. I guess I tried to move through a process of chaotic association—that is, the overflow of emotion recollected in anxiety, to put a spin on Wordsworth. The chaos of memory is, I hope, momentarily suspended in a poetic structure that exposes that chaos as the physics, or metaphysics, of paradox. I’m pretty sure I did not succeed, and I beg the reader’s patience in my self-indulgence. By the way, the trumpet player in the second stanza is, of course, Louis Armstrong.