Read an Excerpt
Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire
By Brenda Hillman Wesleyan University Press
Copyright © 2013 Brenda Hillman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8195-7415-2
CHAPTER 1
TO SPIRITS OF FIRE AFTER HARVEST
Between earth
& its noun, i felt a fire ...
— What does it mean by "i," Mrs?
— It means, (& i quote): one
of the vowels in the brain
& some of the you's —;
we were interested in the type of thing
humans can't know,
interested in kinds of think animals think
— a rabbit or a skink! (Eumeces skiltonianus)
when autumn brings a grammar,
wasps circle the dry stalks
& you can totally
see through amber ankles dangling
in dazzle under our lord the sun
of literature —
Between noon & its noun,
there were ridged
& golden runes on pumpkins ... bluish
gourds — in the fields ...
(their white eyes lined up
inside) — Wait a sec. Please
don't nail the door shut. The air is friendly
& non-existent as Veronica's veil — ...
Earth, don't torment your fool,
your ambassador clown. Bring
the x of oxygen & sex, a fox
running sideways, through present noon —
Some Kinds of Reading in Childhood
Do you remember Picture Day?
Then, when the packets came back —
in each child's eyes:
incomprehensible fire — ;
you were ordinary,
in the sense of: the endangered west; —
your mother wiped the windshield
with a shredded Kleenex
(that's why you deserved your oily treats) —
Inside the school, reading made sparks:
peril, peril, peril-&-awe;
outside the school, acres of signs
in cellophane noon, where
under the school, termites take
the tasty beams into their bodies —
[Incisitermes minor] delicate hairless arms ...
Save the volcanoes for later,
flame-folder. You did such a good job
with the maps!
The world has created a sickness
but the sickness is being
reversed ... Consonants
can be reasoned with, but vowels
start fires — now! breathing
twice: Now! Here come
the bandit occupiers:
silence & meaning —
The Fuel of an Infinite Life
You argue with someone at work. The chemical change
in your shadow meets the dry grass at the edge
of his shadow like an adolescent planning on
burning a field, or the love you wanted
to have later with another, the memory of what
your energy made before he began to speak.
It is impossible to discuss anything with your boss
because he has consulted the priest & they
will never see you again —; you stored that
in the chamber of geometric symbols, saying
to the wings above the granary, there is the fact
of the barren stalks, the pharaoh's dream
of hunger, saying to yourself (a prophetic mute),
the hour will come someday for fire until
there are years of storing energy in these postures,
drawing circles with bones from the nine names
& lights that make words into sticks for
winnowing the shadows of falsity or ridicule.
Even the world, wide as it is, cannot exhaust
the fuel of your life when you are one of
the interpreters about to escape from the dream
with your archived & flexible heat, trying
to keep from hating them at the marketplace,
to remember what would transform judgment
into action if only you could abandon the gifts as if
they were nothing, after you & the pharaoh's
huts are long gone; the dream will not be
idle when it touches the tip of the match
to the willing field after the harvest —
FOR BBH & SM
GRAMMAR OF THIS LIFE AT NOON
The immortals wait in the fields.
& the newt under the laurel (a dragon
whose three heads argued
with themselves —),
the push thistles, Celastrina echo butterfly
with automatic semi-colons
on its wings — ('twill hide
under the clorox-
cloud — & that's that! some punctuation
is just too sensitive to
be outside — )
Stubby white
teeth on that baby vole:
smile on its face — screeep! like
gnostic Jesus, its comma-comma-comma
claws. Clause — verbless mosquito-egg
daylight ...
Worker, dreamer:
your soul has slept with
countesses so long
his hands still smell like money!
He says to himself:
my lord the sun has thrown
his sexual shadow upon me ... (oops!
Where did it go?)
— It's just fallen behind something.
(What has?)
— Whatever you lost.
GEMINID SHOWERS & HEALTH CARE REFORM
Behind the galaxy, there was a flute:
sound was making love to sound;
time was making sound
to sexual, textual, lexical space —
we worked too hard, we lay
near fields from which they gathered plastics —
mimics & contortionists — under the ping-ping
of meteors, under made-up constellations;
the planet flew through space junk
while the Health Care Bill was being penned
with pens from Chantix, pens from Lidoderm
& Protinix, with pens
from Actos, Lamosil, & Celebrex;
late autumn made a fire in us;
the cosmos waited for a sign;
the soul was waiting for the mind,
fat chickadees waited for sweet fennel
[Foeniculum vulgare] & nameless
asters on side streets where drones
take violins to the Queen —
what kind of drones?
The sounds fly out, for thee —
we slept as many as the anyway
where meaning met material, that is,
inside the personal,
that is, for love of earth —
LATE AUTUMN STORMS AT PIGEON POINT
after Richard O. Moore
Existence tells the lighthouse
I am your pigeon, then crash!
we didn't know
it had a window!
Autumn asks its summer:
what if we are only sound
tracking itself, flare
of a fishing boat
(the sea shines purple in);
the body casts its shadow
down the coast,
noon onto the mezzanine —
edge of a thought, a main
but not the only thing. You struggle
to endure your life,
a screen of symbols made of fire;
a nothing calls its something,
its stray hope, no gain;
anarchic music climbs
the tower to turn
the key inside to sing —
AT THE SOLSTICE, A YELLOW FRAGMENT
Our lord of literature
visits my love,
they have gone below,
they have lost their way
among the tablets
of the dead —;
preeeee — dark energy — woodrat
in the pine, furred thing
& the fine,
a suffering among syllables, stops
winter drops from cold, cold,
miracle night (a fox
deep in its hole under yellow
thumbs of the chanterelles,
(no: gold. Gold thumbs, Goldman Sachs
pays no tax ... (baby goats
in the pen, not blaming God,
not blaming them —
(alias: buried egg of the shallow-helmet turtle
[Actinemys marmorata]
alias: thanks for calling the White House
comment line))))
For your life had stamina
from a childhood among priests
& far in the night,
beyond the human realm, a cry
released the density of nature —
EARLY SIXTIES CHRISTMAS IN THE WEST
It takes all the strength of the girl & her mother holding the knife to slice the holiday bird. Lipton Onion Soup flakes floating in the pan. One pinch of irreverent parsley recalls a belief in plants having feelings. The father reads Camus by the fire. Each book is a Bethlehem. The crèche has an arch where violence is delayed.
Around the teenage galaxy
a halo of dark matter
In the nearby desert iron & silicon
Between the dimensions
in a disciplined curved sleep
fat cherubs assert their right to exist
for they make more sense
than McNamara about Communists
Patterns float independently on the girl's apron. Mr. Postman by the Marvelettes. Like Demeter, the mother is great at using leftovers, & the daughter finds a skill for bringing fragments from the dead: My. heart. aches. &. a. drowsy. numbness. The brothers play chess: thump-thump, wooden-skirted figures on ovals of green felt.
THE VOWELS PASS BY IN ENGLISH
— & the owl drops flowers
from its eyes [Dentaria californica] —
the raceme, the stubbed stem lands straight
in the woods — as the ancients do;
on a hazel branch, a cocoon
hoists itself ... with a worm's mind —;
i-eee is released in winter
as humans hold bones to the fire —
they were there a long time,
(interpreting the dead loves
as meaning seeped through the cracks
of centuries held by everyone —);
the ocean rises by inches — when
the wave withdraws, plovers pick evidence
from married footprints as the lyric does,
or sanity ... Luminescent creatures
sink red in the sand —
for they have swallowed ... all 3 sunsets!
& the vowels pass by in English,
the ruined banisters of the A, a bridle-
ring of the O, the saddle of the U
brought from the underworld;
i had to negotiate with devils
to retrieve even this much
from the language of the colonizers —
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire by Brenda Hillman. Copyright © 2013 Brenda Hillman. Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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