Rebecca:
Thank you for this one. Have
printed it, and, having
hung it up on my wall, have
allowed it to cascade down
Cheers,
jerry
> "City bombarded with icicles"
>
> barrier tape is still bandaging trees
> its crime scene garishness
> torn away overnight by the living
> passing through, perimeters
> closed
> for icicle warnings:
> those transparencies thickened
> to stalactite honed
> by a roof’s slow drip
> to clumped ice dams above heads
> dangerous architecture
> keeping pedestrians
> on their toes, a crash the size of a car impending
> above a threshold,
> some squared to drain pipes
> reaching from roof to street,
> others as long as two or three floors
> of menacing overhead
> and that burst of sun
> melting
> frozen fists to a sigh of one slipping loose
> strangest blow of heaven
> this time chunks harmlessly into the walk, strangest blow
> of heaven, breaking the window
> of a car,
> strange
> as a window
> falling from its chain suspended
> above the cafeteria's table
> to shatter upon
> the head of one child
> wearing a frame of brokenness around her neck,
> a jag sheering toward her throat,
> how to move through this new terrain
> dangerous for people down here
> dangerous for people up there
> that man whacking ice
> from his roof
> the postal carrier
> gauging the drip, drip, drip
> of threat, different
> risks of freezing
> falling
> wings, not clouds or lazy circling eagles, but icicle-related injuries
> along the walkways,
> so many
> unnamed, unknown
> looking up in something like alarm,
> uncertain
> where is the clear path for getting to school on Monday
> winding one's way through,
> so much new is unknown,
> even those clumped bushes, each one a shock of wiry branches
> knotted to one root
> whiplike, stripped of leaves,
> nothing left but a host of tiny red berries
> what are they called? why always forgetting to ask?
> the only color blooming
> in ice so many
> could be galaxies constellated
> to random, aperiodic order,
> arrayed in mythic figure and story ripening
> before any eye has been born
> with power to see and fix them to imagined
> shape, though the new stories perhaps
> would resemble the old, the heart evolves so slowly
> and there are only a few predictable ends,
> are they edible? poisonous?
> and to whose tongue?
> perhaps some creature
> could eat them and go on singing,
> or are they some variety, human cultivars
> cultivated to appeal
> to the garden’s predictable shapes of temptation unmeant
> for living hand or tongue
> beautiful singularity,
> piercing intensities of red
> and specificities
> of shape which resist metaphor while inviting
> it, drops of blood?
> like those leeched carefully
> from the acupuncturist’s tiny lancet
> extracting
> too much heat or too much masculinity or feminity
> from a particular body or draining
> the anguish
> of pressure point?
> or self-contained
> shining in their
> spheres, like eggs or earths,
> each one a tiny world meant to seed some meadow
> they will splinter and burst
> to reach, be willingly devoured,
> consumed into another,
> or like the seed some saint visions on the hand
of god
> and sees all world, all eye,
> dreaming within, or was that a fig or a nutmeg?
> or perhaps secular and many, their shapes
> of young women's or men's nipples
> brushed to erectile
> breath or hand,
> but, no, only the shape allows,
> that color is rather
> of lips bit to blood, lipstick, something, nothing but what
> associating mind brings
> as the fool wandering a field of snow brings along weeds of fled
> goathead in heel, burr in palm, festered nettle
> beneath the skin
>
> themselves, too bright, inutterable, unnamed, in this field of snow
> the transport
> transplantation, accidental transmigration, you
> who have no name for what you walk among
> as the sun transpires in the skin of the berries
>
> transects the hazarded edges
> and that legion of frozen angels
> begins to loose its grip
> and falls
> shattering or merely
> melting into the melting earth
>
> *headline borrowed from the Boston Globe
>
> Rebecca Seiferle 12.17am 2.2.05 Waltham MA USA
>
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