Veronica Golos
(USA)
THE STAG
“What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it.” – Rilke
Here is a branch I cannot break
nor reach the simple lilac
at its end. All day I attend
to thinking, broker with
the gods for feeling.
For what do I live? Each
word is a heartbeat,
relentless. Silence too
is a pulse, a rebuke, a more ancient
limb. What is it
I cannot answer? Will not ask?
The past does not wither, it
is eternally young, a wild
stag in the woods, waiting.
“The ox is on my tongue.”
— Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Cassandra:
Telling twice the truth
or revealing the lie
in either case, I live,
or die.
I am pulled awry—
my gown blood splattered –
Oh, lift me away from Troy
all their voices shatter.
What does it cost to say the future
that I dare
not refuse? The high headaches,
the air
itself burning. All is translucent,
the bleat of goat, the wet organs tied,
the shock of desire as my
nipples rise.
Consider
after A.R. Ammons, The City Limits
When you consider redemption is
neither without or within, but
an in-between place where there
is no one; when you consider
the mountain’s careless address
and we, so tiny beneath its slate blue hue;
when you consider the fragility of the
human body, love and its transform-
ations; the monarch butterfly’s long
journey, to die. Of what are we made?
And why? What crushes, what circles?
I wash my dishes, smaller bowl beneath
the slightly larger one, and larger one;
the sudsy water drains in a spool.
When you consider…
Rilke
I come back to you. That ruffle
beneath your surface, piano beneath your hands,
the wild muscularity of your voice.
Where does it lead? I open to you as if
I am in need of prayer. Happiness, o Happiness, you sigh,
is only snatched from something approaching
loss.
Perhaps. I walk in leaner and
leaner circles, climb these hills without
knowing how I get here.
Oh, you knew me once,
knew to kiss
the inside
of my wrist,
how I am mesmerized by sunlight.
I try for your Thingness. Your
long experience of —unsayable. Your yellow,
blue gentian. But I cannot—
I am this—
—the passage of slaves, the haul of wagons, the People,
the censer of dust sweeping across the Plains.
Noli me Tangere
After Caroline Forche’s Blue Hour
Each day, blue is caught
in its blue hour, held trembling within white
walls in a large room.
In the poem we read ” l’heure bleue – cerulean,
gentian, hyacinth, delft, jouvence.” Milky hours.
Slant light, etching the face of yourself.
This comes to us, this blue hour. Some may be helpless
before it, kneeling in its pool; others, delight
and move on through to the kitchen, to prepare
a thick stew. Potatoes, carrots, celery,
cilantros, the tender cut of beef.
A few move toward the blue, hands
before them, as if to be taken. They
will never be taken… for Noli me tangere
is always whispered, as if the blue hour was for
this – to understand for a hour, this.
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http://www.vicamillersalons.com/photos-36
Veronica Golos is the author of Vocabulary of Silence (Red Hen Press, 2011), winner of the 2011 New Mexico Book Award. Poems from Vocabulary are translated into Arabic by poet Nizar Sartawi; and A Bell Buried Deep (Storyline Press, 2004), co-winner of the 16th Annual Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Edward Hirsch, and adapted for stage and performed at Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, CA. A Bell Buried Deep will be re-issued by Tupelo Press in 2014, with an introduction by poet Patricia Smith. She is the co editor of the Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, and Poetry Editor for the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. She lives in Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A., with her husband, writer David Pérez.
http://veronicagolos.wordpress.com/