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Broken and Glorious Life
Like summer, you were a
green haze
between endings.
Like winter, you were
diamonds in
the tomb.
I would take any one
of those dismantled
memories now,
refurbish it
and slip into it
like life-changing
knowledge,
and this time I might
even remember to
say I love you
although sometimes
I just loved
the idea of love,
the feral madness of love . . .
and perhaps that's
Heaven enough for
earthbound explorers
tripping over each
other in this
marvelous, earthy
stupor,
and, well, any love
seeping though the
pinholes of our
humanness is
sanctified.
That green mist
swells into focus
until the world
lives again
in chic robins,
suspicious squirrels
and a pond,
a new concoction,
groggy and black and
rebrewed every hour.
Folds of our sky
laze upon it.
Indoors a part of you
lives a weary,
golden life
and another part
waits for me with
baffling patience.
All you
ever wanted were
droplets of devotion
because you realized
before I did:
everything's a shadow
until it's shared.
I could fall through
this wind forever—
how it takes sweat
and damaged pride
with it as it pulls
away from
my body.
It's a simple
type of kindness
I can accept. Easily.
I'll carry it
back to my
other life where
some things
can be paused
with a remote control
and some things
can be put aside,
but not what
truly matters.
In the softness of
our fossilized quiet,
the past a cathedral
behind us,
its spires chiseled
bit by bit into
pieces,
crumbling or glorious
depending
on the day,
I listen
to my true self
and reach for your hand.
Patricia Joan Jones
another beautifully crafted
another beautifully crafted piece, so in touch with the emotions that we have all felt. There are so many to relate to, but let me point out one that struck me deep,
" any love
seeping though the
pinholes of our
humanness is
sanctified"
What an excellent way to describe our veiled fraility, and our need for acceptance.
Along with applause, I enclose a nodding smile of understanding.
There are few comments more
There are few comments more gratifying than being assured that one's work is relatable. Your understanding and appreciation is always a huge honor. Thank you, luminous Poet, for taking me to a higher place on this difficult day. Brightest blessings.
I have been reading Poetry
I have been reading Poetry for fifty years as of this past April. I have been privileged to spend time with some of the greatest combinations of words by the greatest combiners: Vergil, John Milton, Wallace Stevens. T. S. Eliot; and, since early 2020, Patriciajj. I have said, repeatedly, that the posting of one of Patricia's poems is an event; the way the appearance of a new star on the face of the sky is an event.
In the decades I have been reading, I have developed an appreciation for poems that depict a process; like when Vergil describes the making of Aeneas' shield, designed by Vulcan and forged in the Cyclopean furnaces; or, to cite a modern example, the way the Universe slowly disintigrates in Wallace Stevens' poem, "Chaos In Motion And Not In Motion."
This poem that Patricia has just posted is a process poem, and the process it depicts is not just a key to its own meaning, but an example of how her entire collection works. She begins by showing us two of the primary functions of Poetry as it has come to be understood in the West: the application of metaphor and simile (in this poem, she begins with siimiles) to show us the unity of existence; and the refurbishing of dismantled memories---so that the memories refurbished by the Poet become what she calls, and what is, a life changing knowledge that proceeds to its ultimate purpose---the declaration of Love. I will cite just one precedent for this, although I suppose that examples abound: Eliot's words, in the first section of The Waste Land, tell us that the mix of memory and desire stirs dull roots with spring rain. This happens even in what Eliot, in that poem, calls the Dead Land; and in what, near the end of this poem, Patricia characterizes as a vast cathedral, crumbling or glorious---depending on one's perspective This is a paradox---another process which Poetry reveals to us, because we are creatures of both paradox and contradiction: we praise the day's bright sunlight and then cover our eyes and squint, and we scare ourselves with ghost stories at night, and then, when we can't sleep, we stay up and begin to recognize constellations. Even the most important event in History seems, to us, to be a paradox: the brutally battered and mutilated body of a carpenter, nailed by spikes of Roman iron to two beams of local wood, is also the God Who not only designed and constructed the entire Cosmos, but was also revealed to us as Love---Love (not hatred, not self-righteousness, not conformity) as the God of Life and Salvation.
Ordinary prose, which, for so many of us, passes for attempted poetry when it is stacked (like piles of manure) in vertical arrays, cannot delineate the paradox: the wishful thinking of the wannabe is never fulfilled in the achieved art of the real Poet, when that Poet has been revealed among us. Then that Poet begins to tell us what the processes of this existence our, and what are the paradoxes inherent in those processes: whether that Poet is living on a farm in Mantua and describes ordinary shepherds hering their sheep and falling in love; or a lawyerly insurance executive, between meetings or conferences, sitting at his desk and contemplating the paradoxical relationship between the imagination and reality.
I have tried, during the last three years, to offer interpretations on Patricia's poems as they appear; so that, when I look back, I think I have put together several suggestions of how to interpret her work, and how her poetic artistry and skill actually operate. But I also believe that, someday, there will be a much larger proliferation of commentary on her poems. I still believe that what we are privileged to watch, here at PostPoems, is the steady accumulation of one of the greatest poetic structures of our time. Sure, someone will doubt this assertion; will dismiss it as too expansive; and I will point to those same persons certain published essays, from the roaring twenties, that dismissed The Waste Land as tripe, and declared that Wallace Stevens' poems were merely verbal stunts written for their shock value. But who now really remembers those essays except as laughing stocks in the shadow of the verbal grandeur that those two Poets created simultaneously in one of the most verbally elegant periods of time in human history.
During my undergrad years, the courses in literature that I attended operated from a sort of united purpose: not to establish a single reading of whatever poem, or novel, or tale we were reading, but to place that item within the context of a literary canon. This was one of the influences that Old Possum, the great Eliot, brought to Literature: that it did not happen as individual outbursts with blinkers on, but occurred as part of a Canon---so that one may trace a lineage (or, if you like, a literary DNA) from Vergil, to Dante, to Eliot and Stevens, and to Patriciajj. While we readers (especially those who are scholars) do this, the Poet's perform a similar tracing: they trace the processes that are the basic functions of the Universe as Christ, Who is Love, designed it.
They tell me that Einstein, in his theoretical researches, determined that the Cosmos consisted of four basic forces or processes, and that he proposed (although he never discovered) a mathematical statement that would account for those processes simultaneously. This, on the poetic level, is what Vergil did---and the forces he located were shepherding, farming, and the destruction and construction of cities. This, on that same poetic level, is what Patricia's Poetry does; in each of her poems (sometimes it is centrally displayed, sometimes more subtle in its presentation; but always utterly and ecactly consistent), and, with great awe and admiration, we see that same demonstration in this triumphant poem.
J-Called
No one can read a poem the
No one can read a poem the way you do. You understand and appreciate all the nuances, strategies, intricacies (and simplicity) of thought involved in this artform's construction, and therefore to receive an insightful analysis by The Word Connoisseur and Great Literary Explorer is a thrill and an honor.
Endless thanks for breaking down my process, for expressing appreciation so eloquently and for blessing me with enough encouragement to keep me going for years to come.
You're the best!
Such a clear picture painted
Such a clear picture painted here, love and life as seen with eyes that see truly without adding where there is no need to add.
Candace / Silver Dawn
That was the effect I was
That was the effect I was going for. Thank you for recognizing that and for taking the time to read my work with such perception and appreciation. Means so much.