poemspoemspoems
Jun. 27th, 2003 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maribouSo I've been continuing my immersion in Canadian Poets of My Adolescence. Mary di Michele rocks. Her longest poems are my favorites, but here are some short ones.
Translated World
My daughter before she knows
she is human, might be content
to nest with birds, to lap water
from a bowl with the cat and to feel
in the likeness of her blush to peaches,
the fruit itself plumping her cheeks,
knows the languages of other animals:
chimpanzees and their kennings,
parrot talk like poetic refrain,
knows our garden and its flowers
without their names of tulip, lilac,
or daffodil that I announce,
revels in the lawn, under the sky.
I ask what's blue, what's green?
So It Begins
Whatever passes through my head,
whatever sits on my tongue
made solemn by a sad and lovely mouth,
whatever preaches and makes the air
quick with yellow pollen
like a jack in the pulpit,
whatever forgets its flesh and fashions itself
from the mineral body of the earth,
whatever fits together like a chain of hydrocarbons,
whatever empties itself of essential organs:
heart, liver, brain, uterus,
and makes of itself an abalone shell
for the greater song of the sea to sing in,
whatever the water gives me, I give back
with an open and singing mouth.
A Strange Grace
for my grandmother
Love always dressed herself in black.
She was a fat old woman with dark eyes.
Love always loved me best,
her golden grandchild, the one
who tried to explain herself
right into her heart
for a little chocolate cheese
gilded in foil.
She was an octogenarian, love, a matriarch
and her heart tracked for light
years in its slow orbit in the space
of the chest. Love knew the ivory
limit of her universe and the miracle
of a child emerging with the first light,
in chiaroscuro on the horizon, a cry
drawn out of the nurturing darkness,
a free fall with strange grace toward another
kind of darkness,
and the precocious day chattering and chattering,
as if she couldn't shut up for a second,
as if she couldn't shut up for good,
as if the world could just keep busy on the tip
of her tongue.
Love always dressed herself in black.
Posing with her, seated on a white marble bench
by the Roman gardens, as I stood on the stone slab
our heads were level, the silver and the gold.
My crescent arm around her neck
embracing a primordial passion,
deeper than the forests of Brazilian cocoa,
my truest, my dearest love, in the whole of time,
in the intimacy of my innocence,
the love I left for a new world,
far away from her old country seat,
sealed in marble and invisible,
love, who always loved me best.
Translated World
My daughter before she knows
she is human, might be content
to nest with birds, to lap water
from a bowl with the cat and to feel
in the likeness of her blush to peaches,
the fruit itself plumping her cheeks,
knows the languages of other animals:
chimpanzees and their kennings,
parrot talk like poetic refrain,
knows our garden and its flowers
without their names of tulip, lilac,
or daffodil that I announce,
revels in the lawn, under the sky.
I ask what's blue, what's green?
So It Begins
Whatever passes through my head,
whatever sits on my tongue
made solemn by a sad and lovely mouth,
whatever preaches and makes the air
quick with yellow pollen
like a jack in the pulpit,
whatever forgets its flesh and fashions itself
from the mineral body of the earth,
whatever fits together like a chain of hydrocarbons,
whatever empties itself of essential organs:
heart, liver, brain, uterus,
and makes of itself an abalone shell
for the greater song of the sea to sing in,
whatever the water gives me, I give back
with an open and singing mouth.
A Strange Grace
for my grandmother
Love always dressed herself in black.
She was a fat old woman with dark eyes.
Love always loved me best,
her golden grandchild, the one
who tried to explain herself
right into her heart
for a little chocolate cheese
gilded in foil.
She was an octogenarian, love, a matriarch
and her heart tracked for light
years in its slow orbit in the space
of the chest. Love knew the ivory
limit of her universe and the miracle
of a child emerging with the first light,
in chiaroscuro on the horizon, a cry
drawn out of the nurturing darkness,
a free fall with strange grace toward another
kind of darkness,
and the precocious day chattering and chattering,
as if she couldn't shut up for a second,
as if she couldn't shut up for good,
as if the world could just keep busy on the tip
of her tongue.
Love always dressed herself in black.
Posing with her, seated on a white marble bench
by the Roman gardens, as I stood on the stone slab
our heads were level, the silver and the gold.
My crescent arm around her neck
embracing a primordial passion,
deeper than the forests of Brazilian cocoa,
my truest, my dearest love, in the whole of time,
in the intimacy of my innocence,
the love I left for a new world,
far away from her old country seat,
sealed in marble and invisible,
love, who always loved me best.
