Jerry:
Thanks so much, and your note is almost a little snap itself with that cascade at
the end.
cheers to you too,
Rebecca
---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 16:58:43 -0800
>From: Jerry <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: snap
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>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
>>
|