One longer poem and then a short poem to close.
And then I'll end by reading one poem of Susan's.
This poem is called To One's Honor.
It's in a lazy version of the Beowulf meter,
which is a Hemistich.
Properly in Beowulf, you would have the same number
of syllables on either side of the caesura,
but also the stress would be in the same place.
In this poem I don't follow the stress.
I just have the same number of syllables
on either side of the caesura.
The idea being that it was an oral tradition meter
meant to keep the song in the body.
And it no longer works in modern English.
To One's Honor.
It's true
Our trained builders say
Of something without flourishes or deviation
Fixed to one's honor my rumor, hearsay
And wishes to the things
I-- weedy thing
Says right at the edge of our ages
There's a circle a minute full of space
Well, real, whether the calendar
And the bamboo
Stand in a desert spring
Gray and green, and turn in time
And the heat.
It brings
An extra first violation of me at 9
Or 27, so that thereafter
My necessarily welcomed fear
Makes a room
And puts me in it where
A little simple pornography
Calms me right down
Takes up the space well enough
And the chanted
Fucking is like exquisitely formal transubstantiation
I look up to address
A neutral kind of shame
and its awareness
Lays a gentle hand on my sternum
Receives or takes
It's just a hand
One guesses
One is asking about the hands a verb
One can't know
What the other one
Does under one's hand
What does one want to know
If after the speaking,
The ears can admit things
Again.
The sounds of breath
With the ghost always
Of the ghost body from which they came.
Think of a place without reading
The word sex was sloughing
Off of the child to
Say, I was leaking some
Release of awareness in water
As rain falling down the year
Who is soaking in all this paper
Folded space
It's really very small
No feeling need be there with
Me, I'm putting the words in
Someone to look at
As I am looking to be
Where words just make another room
Come round, come rain, hand here.