Postcards from the Imagination

Here is a gorgeous spring Saturday evening. Here also is a not unattractive, single woman sitting home alone because, well, here is here and not elsewhere. *Sigh* At least I have my books. I drove down to the library at BC today and put together the following spring reading list (in no particular order):

• James Schuyler, A Few Days
• Ted Berrigan, The Collected Poems
• Clark Coolidge, Polaroid
• Alice Fulton, Cascade Experiment
• Alice Fulton, Feeling as a Foreign Language
• Laurie Sheck, The Willow Grove
• Larissa Szporluk, Isolato
• Larissa Szporluk, Dark Sky Question
• Michael Palmer, The Lion Bridge

Did I mention having picked up used copies of Fulton and Szporluk cheap the last time I traveled, and then forgetting them on the plane? I don't think I did. Somewhere in the sky not far from Seattle, I read the following with no little wonder:

One Thousand Bullfrogs Rejoice

It is dark inside the body, and wet,
and double-hearted. There are so many ways
to go, and not see, and lose
the feeling of the thread, which was alleged
to be invisible, and lose the man,
the fast Athenian, to someone with less rootage,
and never reach the fabled center,
afraid that if you did, you would find the hybrid,
not the hero, beautiful.

If you want to jump ahead,
Chapter Two just tells you how you erred
in Chapter One, taking his hand first
and being honest. Chapter Three says never mind,
you won't get another chance
to guide him. No one loves a volunteer.
No one loves a savior.
Chapter Four is set along the shore
where you are hiding, where life outside you
changes surface hourly.
Chapter Five: A skeleton is tangled
in a hyacinth. Their intimate clutch,
only for a minute, weirds you.
Tide is always bringing those reminders.
But here you keep in tune with rhythmic raging.
You open like a mussel made of gold
to anything in want of shelter,
anything with devious or laudable intentions.
Chapter Six. You open like a song
and bellow in the ear of second guessing.

(Larissa Szporluk)