Month: April 2017
Here’s the title poem from my new book.
“Before There Was Before” was first published in the journal Common Ground.
1.
Before there was before, there was still before,
no verb to carry the abyss.
Light from dark, this from that, an easing
of boundaries, a slit
making a run for it,
everything
blue at the edge of that pose.
2.
The Big Bang hurled all the starstuff
ever to be made—brazen tumult,
lashed by the muscle of spume,
hydrogen and helium waiting
for their rings to close,
dark tonnage, billions and billions
of mewling seedstars,
all burning and burning
themselves out, the universe
braced to decay.
3.
The shoulder of one boulder settling
against the shoulder of another.
Canyons cleaving, granite
wrenched free.
The apple asleep
inside the sleeping tree.
4.
The tide slinks in.
Shelves of blue-green algae.
Bluefish.
Lungfish.
Weakfish.
5.
Shaggy-maned mushrooms
sink and dissolve. Beneath,
beetles frill.
Pea vines, holdfast clovers.
Bees shiver the white throats—
Whales slip through the slot.
Baleen and blue milk spilled
through all the rooms of the ocean.
Long lives call and click
the grievous migrations.
Sharp-shinned hawks seize
their trophies, clamping down
the whole lid of air.
7.
When trees come, they are meant to
be climbed.
Stay away, or come, or come
just this far—you and I are
here, the compound of us,
a colossal conjunction.
And the calendulas in the field
who are riddled
with life-spark and flaws.
Let’s take a stab
at the dark, let’s
time our tea,
if we have tea,
if we have time.
My New Book, Before There Was Before, Is Here!
Click here to read more: http://www.irisbooks.com/drexler/Before%20There%20Was%20Before.htm
The cover is a detail from a painting by Cambridge, MA, artist Tanya Hayes Lee, titled “Genesis Series: The Second Day, 8.” I’m really glad to have found her paintings a few years back. And kudos to my publisher, Iris Press, and Beto and Robert Cummings, for shepherding my manuscript through and for the beautiful cover design. I’ll post a few poems from the book soon.
Skunk Cabbage
Saw my first spring skunk cabbage of the year today at Mass Audubon’s beautiful Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary in Natick, MA.
This poem is from my book Western Motel.
Skunk Cabbage
Out of nowhere, then,
skunk cabbages astonish
the meadow: pursed
and swollen spathes,
putrid fists, ugly,
unreticent, and inside,
a knotted yellow swarm.
Slugs, snails, five-lined skink,
blue-bottled flies are avid
on the cud of mottled leaves
whose stench is salvage.
How long winter slung itself
over my shoulder,
each rogue thing
obstinate, returning—