Voice

To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.”
—Allen Ginsberg, WD

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Raised Voice               Katie Ford

I had no craving. I heard sirens at night.

No craving, and a moon through the blinded window.

I listened to hymns and asked so much of them they quieted

like a body that withers when it feels itself

clung to. I was taught the body is deceptive.

The heart, deceptive.

Get out of me but stay with me, the city cried.

I had been looking up at the awnings with names,

trying to find a place for us. I am uncertain now,

but there was no moon. Shop lights on and off then off

for good. When Thomas asked to see the extent

of the wounded body, evidence

was consecrated as a holy request.

Evidence being that which screams its moment—

one need not even look.

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One Dispensation    Elizabeth Whittlesey

Night has embalmed the trees in water turned
To ice. There could be sparrows hiding, where,
However, no flesh seems to know, the only
Aim the living sustain today is movement
Along the snow, to keep the motion steady.
Again, in the case of winter versus city,
Winter has beaten city, but with brutal
Softness, so that city lays herself down,
Though in a faux submission. She will play
The part this whiteness asks; they play this part
Together as they scan their muted pageant,
A blustery monument to themselves, (saying):
See how the slim bare branches bear the thickness
That afflicts them. See how the human tries
To navigate a scene where all distinction

Has been taken. See the shovel, hear how
It scrapes across the pavement in a rite
Of defiance. See them sow salt on paths,
Purged of the usual murmur of their thoughts
And voices. See they only seem to note
Their steps now, one after the other. See what
Happiness we have smothered on this city.

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To Be Continued: A Parable                Samuel Hazo

It's like a play.
                     Or rather
   the revival of a play in which
   you're still the main character.
The set, the lighting and the stage
   are what they were, but not
   the cast.
                Different actors
   have the roles that other actors
   acted when the play first
   ran.
         You make comparisons
   but then accept the differences
   as given.
                 Somehow you only feel
   secure in character but alien
   to all the others on the stage.
Their names will keep on changing
   as the run resumes with younger
   people in older roles.
                                 The script
   will stay the same.
                              You know
   your lines by heart but try
   to say them in a different voice
   each night.
                  The other actors
   say your character and you
   are one.
               Sometimes this seems
   a sentence, sometimes a challenge.
Either way you keep on playing
   your part.
                 You have no choice. 

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Rhyme                           Robert Pinsky

Air an instrument of the tongue,
The tongue an instrument
Of the body, the body
An instrument of spirit,
The spirit a being of the air.

A bird the medium of its song.
A song a world, a containment
Like a hotel room, ready
For us guests who inherit
Our compartment of time there.

In the Cornell box, among
Ephemera as its element,
The preserved bird—a study
In spontaneous elegy, the parrot
Art, mortal in its cornered sphere.

The room a stanza rung
In a laddered filament
Clambered by all the unsteady
Chambered voices that share it,
Each reciting I too was here—

In a room, a rhyme, a song.
In the box, in books: each element
An instrument, the body
Still straining to parrot

The spirit, a being of air.

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Pattern

Something and Nothing                            Katie Ford

In the month my brother began to love a married woman,
the month the lantana took all the heat of late summer
into its orange sanctuary blooms, bearing it, storing it
as if for some suddenly-cold October night, he let her be.

In a twilight in which we are told the stars are portioned
into patterns like goblets and horses and archers he slid
her photograph into a copper frame welded
at the edges with a darker wire melted against it

and in. And it became
something of untiring capacity, growing
like the miles of hollowed land stunned and crafted
so far before us the metallic light of morning
that we could never imagine
unmade the land,
then towered the rain down, centuries worth,

to make a lake of what was gone, desire in which he let
her be and waters where the tired
but living carp swim back and forth. 

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We thrive, in part, when we have purpose, when we still have more to do. The deliberate incomplete has long been a central part of creation myths themselves. In Navajo culture, some craftsmen and women sought imperfection, giving their textiles and ceramics an intended flaw called a “spirit line” so that there is a forward thrust, a reason to continue making work. Nearly a quarter of twentieth century Navajo rugs have these contrasting-color threads that run out from the inner pattern to just beyond the border that contains it; Navajo baskets and often pottery have an equivalent line called a “heart line” or a “spirit break.” The undone pattern is meant to give the weaver’s spirit a way out, to prevent it from getting trapped and reaching what we sense is an unnatural end.    Sarah Lewis in The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

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The Pieces That Fall To Earth                           Kay Ryan

One could

almost wish

they wouldn't;

they are so

far apart,

so random.

One cannot

wait, cannot

abandon waiting.

The three or

four occasions

of their landing

never fade.

Should there

be more, there

will never be

enough to make

a pattern

that can equal

the commanding

way they matter.

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“I know that I have an instinct towards math and cleverness in structure that I work against, and so I try to make something … I make this whole structure which takes up a cork wall of index cards, and then I feel that is the architecture of the book, and what you do with architecture is that you cover it completely . . . And why I am driven to make something this complicated I don’t know. It’s just a pleasure for me always in all kinds of reading and fiction to know that there is some kind of clock ticking in the background. It could be rhetorical device, the way that language goes in the book. That there’s a pattern to it, because it’s nice to feel when you close the book that there’s a pattern to life.” Andrew Sean Greer in an interviewwith Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm 

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Time                                                    Robert Creeley

Moment to

moment the

body seems

to me to

be there: a

catch of

air, pattern

of space— Let’s

walk today

all the way

to the beach,

let’s think

of where we’ll be

in two year’s

time, of where

we were. Let

the days go.

Each moment is

of such paradoxical

definition—a

waterfall that would

flow backward

if it could. It

can? My time,

one thinks,

is drawing to

some close. This

feeling comes

and goes. No

measure ever serves

enough, enough—

so “finish it”

gets done, alone.

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Desire is, among other things, a function of repetition, or so the very patterns of your life have led you to believe. John Keene

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