Stephen
thanks for this, and for your lively and compassionate memoir about
this poet I had never heard of on your blog.
Definitely all you say of her, if this single example is true to the
whole....
Doug
On 14-Oct-07, at 9:24 AM, Stephen Vincent wrote:
> Laura Ulewicz
> Detroit,Michigan, May 1930 - Locke, California, October 2007
>
> Within One Temperate Zone (2)
>
>
> It wasn't on the map. heat stalled the car
> At the valley or base of the 10th hill. Lost.
> A post office side the town of San Sinduda. Not
> On the map. I asked Carl, "Who do you suppose
> has ever climbed that hill?" In a thousand
> Years maybe one Indian. A ranch-hand
> After cattle. A bull after a cow.
> Two boys in black jeans leaned against a log fence
> Playing a pocket radio and cursing
> Loud to beat the vastness down. A matter
> Of will and hot jazz. I said, "It's pretty
> Tame here" - being, of course, wrong. I might
> Have meant "too wild with people". And so
> we climbed,
> Until the car should cool, more to escape
> Noise than to discover. That seconded
> The wrong. Yet, pausing for breath on the ascent,
> Carl told me how on his mother's grave in Concord,
> While drunk, he first made love to another man.
> In Concord - where the hills are monumented
> With Hawthorne, Melville, Walden Pond, and our first
> Revolution for severance - the fought one.
> Now we looked eastward across a namelessness
> Of hills. For beyond this one was another equal
> In size, and beyond it another, until
> Our minds, wanting to fix, were trapped in freedom.
> Often I dream I open a hundred doors
> And behind each door there is only another door.
> Laura Ulewicz
> from The Inheritance, Turret Books, London, 1967
>
> For more on Laura, http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
>
> Stephen Vincent
>
>
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
Latest book: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
and this is 'life' and we owe at least this much
contemplation to our western fact: to Rise,
Decline, Fall, to futility and larks,
to the bright crustaceans of the oversky.
Phyllis Webb
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