The trees practice it all winter—the honey locusts, with their spiritual thorns, their dry pods of sweetness, the death pale birches like bony priestesses and the deflowered flower girl plums, naked and wind-thrashed, in bruise colors. But, what ascetic hermit can resist disporting when April unbosoms! one of Vermeer’s women, dressed up in such lush …
Half-hidden, her thimble, little dimpled well. What residue of her salt does it contain? (The chary bird in me loves to sip from it.) Measuring tape, scissors… Enough equipment here for the tedious Fates. Yes, here is her favorite pincushion, the sharps and darners stuck in it like small, heroic swords.
She’s thinking of song— dividing the day into eight juicy bits, into sixty little books of six folded sheets, “always in ink,” the worm of oblivion tucked neatly into one gnawed corner— polishing some lapidary idea of a frayed eternity. Her hair is red feathers—a robin’s breast (wary little bird binding us to her paint.) …
Imagining Emily Dickinson in 1852 She’s thinking of song— dividing the day into eight juicy bits, into sixty little books of six folded sheets, “always in ink,” the worm of oblivion tucked neatly into one gnawed corner— polishing some lapidary idea of a frayed eternity. Her hair is red feathers—a robin’s breast (wary little bird …
I like to keep in touch with the poems of friends who have died. Because death is the unknown galaxy separating (linking) us, I want to infuse myself with the still-living light of their words. And so I returned again to Walter Pavlich’s Spirit of Blue Ink (published by Swan Scythe Press in 2001.) I …
It’s quite nice to be out here in one of Molly’s innovative “cottages,” listening to the sound of the wind, shrubberies brushing the outside walls, branches doing arabesques; feeling a bit like Dorothy just before she’s transported to Oz. There are some garden tools within sight—rakes, a shovel, hoes, crowded into a Wilson golf bag …
by Susan Kelly-DeWitt 1. I recently read two books, published twenty years apart, and both are works of genius. My first question to myself: How did I miss the one published in 1992, by an author whose work I have loved since the beginning? Somehow I did miss it— and then, after buying it, even …
I belong to a Poet’s Club (as we have chosen to call ourselves, and which I have written about here before.) Each time we meet, the host-poet hands out a writing assignment for the next time; our most recent assignment was a haibun. Haibun is traditionally a prose/haiku set having to do with travel. American …