PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Astonished by this in particular...

"Now in the unendurable

embrace of beauty—

icy purity—

I practice the fine 

art of forgetting, 

yet somehow you're

still the wind

chiming without 

a voice,

and I still carry around

this collapsable heart,

still adore the idea

of love's giddy hazard,

while knowing

joy was never something

outside myself."

I've been on this site many years. I am ecstatic to have stumbled upon your writing and can't wait to endure more.

Im about to comment... but first I will read the lustrous thoughts in blue so see what else I can find in this glorious poem with so much infused. I am struck for the right words and I dont have enough time but I will come back here and place what is mine 

The gratefulness of being able to read such deeply rich and indelible works by your remarkable hand so graciously led by your head, heart and mind 

I want to extend my comment by just a bit, beginning with an extended metaphor from my past.  For the first fourteen years of my life, my parents' house was on the edge of a pine tree forest.  So close to the edge of it that I could reach over the chain link fence and touch the living branches of an ancient pine tree.  The fragrance, all year around, was wonderful.  On the north edge of the pine tree forest, the Pennsylvania railroad came through, at least four trains a day.

    But to me, even though we lived with this beauty daily, the best version of it was the Christmas Tree my parents put up and decorated on the day after Thanksgiving (and when my widowed grandmother began attending our Thanksgiving dinner, they moved the tree to Thanksgiving afternoon).  The tree would be thickly decorated with bulbs, lights, silver rope, and icicles.  And, sometimes, beneath it, a Lionel electric train rushed around the base on an unrealistic track of three rails.  The odor when the locomotive motor became warm was one I have always associated with Christmas.  To my young mind, this was more beautiful than the realistic forest and rail tracks just beyond our back yard.

   I said all that to say this.  Patricia's art is very much like that situation from my early years.  She takes natural details, adorns them in her language, and gives us a perspective that the reader might not have had prior to the reading.  For example, focusing on that final stanza which continues to astound me, I have felt renewed in the mornings; I have walked among trees, and I have breathed, and have been one of the living.  But Patricia's poetry in this stanza has also reminded me of the Egyptian sun being born anew each day; and of the account of our first parents in Eden.  These had been separate items of which I was aware---but they had not been decorated with Patricia's words and phrases; so that, while aware of them (the Lord has allowed me to read about ancient Egypt for fifty-eight years, beginning with an account of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb), they did not come together for me until this poem brought them together.  Patricia's poetry is not ostentatiously allusive, in the manner, say, of Milton and Pope, and of Eliot in The Waste Land.  Because she sets, as her Poetry's venue, the whole Cosmos, she can be very subtle in her allusiveness.

    One can read any kind of poem casually.  When I took a course on epics during my sophomore undergrad year, I was a little shocked at how casually some of my peers read Vergil's Aeneid.  But if a reader brings only a casual reading to Patricia's poetry, the loss will be that reader's, not hers.  I will add something here that I read back in 1978, in Diane Wakoski's collection of poems, The Magellanic Clouds.  She wrote a prefatory essay, ostensibly about Wallace Stevens' poem, "Peter Quince At The Clavier," but, really, was about her poems.  She said that the point of an exact reading of a poem, or poems, is that you should fine the internal connetions.  To go back to my example from college, we should have noticed Vergil's connection of his epic to the Homeric mythos, to the poetic beliefs of Callimachus, and to his own contemporaries like Catullus.  That is a full reading of the poem; or, to borrow a phrase from the Possum, a reading with gusto.  Patricia's poetry must be read with gusto, and the internal connections (of her poems with themselves, and of her poems with the Western Canon) in order to function as she intended them to function.  I remember either reading or hearing about some rather casual student who wondered how Pop Stevens could write poetry about something so mundane as insurance.  (Stevens did not).  That is a reading lacking in so much gusto that I can hardly describe its stupidity.   Poets of Patricia's quality and achievement must be given a reading with gusto; no other reading can yield the full blossoming of the poem.   

I attempted to post a comment earlier, but due to my stupid laptop's glitching, everything I wrote was lost, so I am going to try to reproduce it here, and I apologize in advance if it is not exactly the same.  I think I have combed out all the typos, but I make no guarantee.

   The poem's center of gravity is the stanza that begins "In truth . . ." and this is not just a poetic statement that she makes, it is also a philosophical and metaphysical statement that approaches theology.  Only the greatest of Poets do this:  Vergil, Old Possum Eliot, and Pop Stevens.  I have said, in earlier comments, that, at the banquet table where those Poets are seated, Patriciajj has a standing invitation and reservation.  She may even play Euchre with them (here's a hint:  add the joker as the supreme bauer, that can overthrow the other two, to make the play more exciting, and that also gives the cat's hand a full compliment of cards).  To that group, I would also add Callimachus, the director of the great Library in Ptolemaic Alexandria, said to have been appointed to that position by its founder, Ptolemy II.  Callimachus was a Poet of Aetia---the poetic explanation of the beginnings of things:  the cosmos, cities and wars, games of Euchre and the cats' hands (no, just kidding there).  In this poem, Patricia gives us an Aetia of how something---an attitude, a perspective, a metaphysical awareness---begins; and she defines that in the final stanza, and it is on this stanza that I would like to concentrate this comment.  

    She speaks of the morning of birth; but it is not her birth as an infant of which she writes.  Long before Ptolemy and Callimachus (who were ethnic Greeks resident in Egypt), the ancient Egyptians believed that the sun was reborn each morning.  But they were also sensible enough to realize that the sun was not reborn as a newborn star each morning:  the sun already knew what path to follow, and for how long to stay in the sky.  The sun was born into the newness of the day; and, in this final stanza of the poem, Patricia's soul enters the newness of the day, which is a rebirth of sorts, the same process as the Egyptian sun.

     But then, she swerves beyond ancient Egypt, and goes back to Eden itself, and look how her lines in that stanza resonate.  Eden was a garden, and we know there were trees thriving there.  God breathed into Adam and Eve the breath of life and, according to Moses' theology, that made them living souls.  And what did they do then?  They lived.  Even after they fouled up, they lived.  This final stanza reiterates that process in three short lines---in the garden of the trees, the breath of life enables a living soul to live.  

      This is one of the aspects of Patricia's poetry that I love the best and, frankly, admire the most.  Her lines are mot restricted to the here and now; or her location in geography or chronology.  She can range throughout recorded time---this one stanza has helped us revisit ancient Egypt, and then further back to Eden; and she presents this with the style of the Great Poets . . . in this case, Callimachus.  Her poems' structures are different than his, and I don't think she runs a library, but her metaphysical approach is in the same field and venue as his, and that is a might fine place to be.

   One of my life's frustrations has been that, although I was taught by some very fine scholars about Poetry, the poems that the taught were written by Poets already deceased.  Sure, I knew how Vergil wrote his epic; I had read "my girl" Mary Shelley's journal about her struggles with Frankenstein; and I had read Valerie Eliot's amazing transcript of the original Waste Land manuscripts, which allowed me to watch a poem gathering itself together over the course of several years.  But none of this was in real time.  But then, almost three years ago, shortly after I had been released from weeks and weeks in the hospital, random browsing brought me to Patricia's poems ("Gates of Orion," "Council of Stars")---and, as I began to delve into her gallery on PostPoems, I knew that, for the first time, I would now see---as an ongoing process---the same functions that I had spent years studying.   I have not been disappointed; not for one fraction of one second.  I have described Patricia's poetry as Cosmic.  She does not limit her perspective to the mundane local.  Like Dante, she takes the whole cosmos as her poetic venue.  Frankly, I don't want to live to see her final poem, because I don't want to see the process ever end.  I am content to read her final poem in Heaven, and I certainly believe that the Heavenly library receives each new poem that she constructs.  I won't live to see the PhD dissertations that will be written about her Poetry, either; but, unlike those future grad students, I have a ringside seat to the ongoing process of her Poetry's expansion, and, for once, they can envy me.  Their understanding will be far more refined than mine, because they will know the whole completed work.    But I, and all of you who read her poems, have the thrill---the privilege---the blessing of watching the poems assemble right before our amazed and astounded eyes; and, more than that, our souls are among the first souls to whom her Poetry speaks.  That's a mighty fine time and place to be, and I, for one, a, grateful to her, to the Cosmos of which she writes so poetically and majestically, and to God, Whose wonders she gathers into her poems to remind us of just where we live, and who we are.