Whether in English or in French, the mechanics of verb tense are complex, all clutch and gearshift, like a 1979 Volkswagen I once owned, its electrical system sparking at the steering wheel one afternoon on California Route 17 . . .
The air is free // The paths infused with orange / The sun lies down in saffron robes / It is the season of laughter and tall grass // Oh my love of one hundred patiences / This evening everything is a first time.
ALIVENESS. Which is & is not simple awakeness, eyes wide openness, the gate a fresh coat of picket.
In the white of my poems / I’m dying // Dressed by alphabet letters / I escort myself to the grave
I sell to you / / A single branch of hollyhock / —Beauty, say you dare not / How Love towards you draws me, / Reveals all without speaking
This is a story about trading in language, a story of sale and purchase, acquisition and acquiescence. It’s a story knit of female voices, past and present, each creating (and recreating) the other in turn.
Which is to say the light we make with each other is beguiling—like watching fire, we can’t seem to turn away. Even when we feel burning, not a folly, but a madness.
Good merit and notable wisdom / Often return their profits. // So says my mistress, a lady / Whose hands held only ash.
One is the first positive odd number, an integer not evenly divisible by two. Odd, from the Old Norse oddi, point of land, triangle, the odd point sticking out, not lining up. As Dr. Math explains, the words we use are pictures of the shapes a number makes.
Every image held its outermost / Paths joined in their night // When one afternoon wheat sheaved from daybreak / Suddenly my soul was a smooth stone oh precious rest