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3 Poems - By Sheila Murphy 1 Poem - By Charles Potts |
A woman's voice ought not be votive, rather loamed as vespers. Chant sans tension, treble-free. Risen things induce reflexive gravity. One is often stunned by surfaces. The faithful would like better to be knighted than to have created the definitive show-stopping work. Some peace remains incurable. Here in the unnoticed column people have been walking their dogs, away from any inference of lifetimes. Rain crosses fallow fields out of the wake of lenses. Practically nothing glides past evident mistakes till spring time brings on fifty years more effortless desisting one can chart and view to seek a trend. Interspersion Chariot comes, goes, penitence also Refract some form of dissonance and gather, then, what maybe lives against our tribal inter-generative spores. The life of volunteer deflection counts as stores of rubble next to chaste young periscopes that eek out sentences from what is not implored. The word yonder still demeans itself. Temperate distinct from temperature, drift seeds and play text as would be configured. Prominence excludes while still requiring audience of otherwise unoccupied . . . finesse tones light the wood. Insouciance retrieves just one of us. Within the larger sphere of gravity's approaching. Color of the Ink, Color of the Snow Shelf is ice full, yarn detracts from simpler. . . . Noise from night. Some studies numbed left pianissimo to become the temperature of our affection. Long-held Chopin in gardens after-lure lean toward the impulse to have made them. Yes is twice the energy that larks . . . a power simulating precedence that guides each timber to the sparse event that will be home to any intellect with will to feather tests. The warm keys comprise a situate legato where the woman will have played. Never accurately termed practice over darkness. Having to own morning in a covetous, still way. Whatever inkling is unheard will cavity along a park. Just so, the middle land and tincture function much like memory. Size of the town, a sampler, crossing with long stride to pastures where it has seemed safe to walk - Sheila Murphy 2001
In Memory of Charles Olson
No poets are ever going to superimpose An ideal political system onto the people of North America Because politics is the art of the possible Not the possibilities of art. There is another deeper reason That our imaginations can't get to while designing A method for any group larger than ten. The kernel is contained in your spurning of Toynbee, The one man who made a saturation job of history, Not that he had been taking your advice on saturation, And learned more about it than anyone, even you, would care to hear. If you had heard him you’d have recognized in his extrapolations of The universal state The quagmire tar baby of North America in your time. Universal state’s are negative institutions, Coming into being after a military knockout blow. Toynbee didn’t invent the phrase for our benefit, But he uses it accurately to describe the condition of this empire. Conditions which lead Thomas "Tip" O’Neil, Onetime Speaker of the House of Representatives During the Reagan rampage which he supported -- The bipartisan bailout of Social Security on the backs of the working poor -- When the House had a 100 vote majority of Democrats, Southern conservatives who hadn’t switched to the Republicans yet, Just another daffy Irish Catholic from Massachusetts, To say: "All politics is local," Which means desperate, self-serving, adhoc, Which means in his own picayune way O'Neil’d have understood Toynbee’s description of our political dilemma. Actually we have a choice and dilemmas are limited to An Aristotelian fricassee of either or. Our choices are: Support the state and act like you enjoy and deserve the benefits it confers; Revolt like romantics and attempt with futility to establish political independence; -- The Olsonian choice -- or Work on your spirituality. Which is why I face the sea this morning 300 miles inland and still swayed by the tides Of indifference as they wash and lap upon us. No one on the land who speaks this language Is making any sense at all about what’s happening to us. The spirit is more appealing than the caucus of compromise. Even when it promises to build An organic new system in the carcass of the old, It’s still deficient in appeal when held to the heat of art. Armed primarily with wits and art We make our way in the world. It is this great new clash for control of The lake of the Pacific that appeals to me. A mountain boy, once, and Now The old man from the mountains Checking in.
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