Green is the Orator

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by Gridley, Sarah




  Green is the Orator

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the College of Arts and Sciences at Case Western Reserve University.

  SARAH GRIDLEY

  Green is the Orator

  University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

  University of California Press

  Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

  University of California Press, Ltd.

  London, England

  © 2010 by The Regents of the University of California

  For acknowledgments of previous publication, please see page 89.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gridley, Sarah, 1968–.

  Green is the orator / Sarah Gridley.

  p. cm. — (New California poetry ; 29)

  ISBN 978-0-520-26241-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-520-26242-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Nature—Poetry. I. Title.

  PS3607.R525G74 2010

  811’.6—dc22 2009037667

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

  For life- and love-giving mothers, in the biologic and cosmic realizations of the word. For Beecher, Elizabeth, Julie, Kitsey, Laure, Linda, Martha, Patricia, and Mom.

  Contents

  ONE

  Coefficient

  Salt Marsh, Thick with Behaviors

  Table of Consanguinity (The Cousin Chart)

  Diminution of the Clear Thing

  Half Seas Over

  Jardins sous la pluie

  Sweet Habit of the Blood

  Is He Decently Put Back Together?

  Under the Veil of Wildness

  Coming to the Festival of the God of Boundaries

  Makes an Arrangement

  Return of the Native to the Widespread Hour

  Midlander

  Thicket Play

  Honey Ants

  Recessive

  Sending Owls to Athens

  William James, Henry James

  Arethusa

  Arrowsic

  Eidothea

  Sunrise with Sea Monsters

  Where Hardly Hearth Exists

  TWO

  Sonnet on Fire

  The Bad Infinity

  Baroque

  Miscellany

  Baroque

  A General Discrimination of Synonyms

  Baroque

  Antonyms & Intermediaries

  Baroque

  First Inspirations of the Nitrous Oxide, Pneumatic Institute, 1799

  Baroque

  Second Inspirations of the Nitrous Oxide

  THREE

  Disheveled Holiness

  Medieval Physics

  A Boredom of Spirit

  Gothic Tropical

  Film in Place of a Legal Document

  Japonisme

  Against the Throne and Monarchy of God

  Acousmatic

  The Orator’s Maximal Likelihood

  The Beauty of Where We Have Been Living

  Anatomy of Listening

  Sighting

  If It Be Not Now

  Ovation

  Morse Gives Up Portraiture

  Intrinsic

  Intimations

  Constable of the Sweet Oblong

  Work

  Salon/Saloon

  Strokes

  Building Box (Atlantic)

  Posthumous

  Oratorium

  Summer Reading

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  ONE

  He is hell become heaven, becoming hell; he is evolution, a matter of energy, a star in the dark tomb, a shadow cast by sunlight. He is life that cannot be contained, a holy insurrection, blessed negativity.

  Coefficient

  About the star-cold abundance of August sand—

  this spell of my two hands working in the dark

  I liken to the feeling of your two hands working

  behind me, or your two hands coming before me

  in the white mirth of bright drapes, white lengths

  the wind sends in salt-light through the feeling

  your two hands have in coming to find me.

  There are things I liken to crossbeams

  inside of things I call politeness, things I liken to super-

  intendence, seashells, pale hosts of erosions, fadings

  I liken to insight. There in the window

  of your soloist house, I think that nothing

  is holding up

  this thought that is feeling you moving.

  Salt Marsh, Thick with Behaviors

  In seasoned assertion, the red-winged calling of the grass.

  From spaces outside the territory, the stone summons,

  the stone sum. Weight is a quality known to boundary’s

  swerve. The sum of which is fragile: waves leave mica

  stuck to skin. Some I know of inherence. Some

  I have not remembered. Among the lightest of insects,

  a Comma has a cryptic edge. A woman should behave herself,

  naturally. In mica, the glamorous stammer of mirror—

  A woman should behave herself naturally. Bill-tilt,

  check-call, songspread—a bone flute snapped

  from passage of bird—the unearthed

  played unearthly.

  Table of Consanguinity (The Cousin Chart)

  Once they are there,

  the bearings are theirs, the sickness peculiar to motion

  removed by horizon’s evident flatness.

  What they bear is the date, and whatever will follow.

  Bay of gray margins, mobile as curfew. Rollick of tides

  and empty casements. Stone-deaf stones marking thoughts

  out loud. Schist like a book of tempers.

  Stars in dogged pantomime.

  Exactly what

  the waves were for lengthening.

  Slow, elemental line. Gray like the saint of a put-out fire.

  Sea of gray margins, solemn as seals. On it a flash

  like something wrong. On it the falling quiet.

  What they touch is the moss

  like an earthly expense.

  Green in a poise

  almost vernacular, almost the sensible

  guide to North.

  Diminution of the Clear Thing

  My somnolence is

  the rest of trees (sessile touch around dry leaf

  to know my weirdest passiveness). To go the irises

  the pebbled drive the luminous

  claps into valley.

  When you have posted a letter in the open air,

  an artist will know your feeling,

  will ground the clouds in canines of noon,

  gold leaf pressured over graphite sun.

  To feel outside an envelope—

  unchangeable corner mailbox blue—

  there are words in the morning against

  the mind, containing sleep

  in the shape of walking. A nomenclature castle opens to sky:

  grassy crenellations

  I may not taste

  or touch.

  Chagrin the name between the banks,

  so many doors down and winded from
counting,

  pronouns in acts of substitution,

  weirdness in the middle of making promises,

  where I am in mind for nothing else

  than to call out,

  to wander ahead with names—

  to emerge as the last of the wood-

  wind family.

  To call out,

  to utter in

  an undertone—

  the continents

  in nameable forms, the squid

  that tastes where it touches.

  Half Seas Over

  Or simply, drunk—Dutch courage in the face of milk and flummery—

  our passive margin, our transitional crust, our rift obtusely

  known as creation.

  As it lost its concentration, gold was a million things

  that wouldn’t be dragged from ocean:

  crass undertaking

  a reason to form— the sun profounding surface—

  the come-loose asterisks

  of starfish bones.

  Jardins sous la pluie

  You paint precipitation

  following thunder: wands of soaked fire, arcs of sea-

  revising sun, salt come up to seed in clouds, downfallen cool

  and diagonal water.

  You paint the garden the garden is: a border blued in

  in heavy heads, hydrangeas fed aluminum sulfate,

  a border blued up in amended beds, in old

  pear peelings and grass.

  Moon is to the blueness of panicles as seawater is

  to the whiteness of rain. Hours in this feeling

  of yours and mine.

  Born in the woulds of the given body, waking up

  this often there.

  Sweet Habit of the Blood

  Viburnum’s winter fairy globe: in outer robing

  it is vivid: a cardinal meal in the drifting bright.

  As inner movement understood, radiant caverns

  in the out of sight. Up for the habit

  of the robust world, the wood boat floating

  of a starred green loom.

  Wherever unsteady

  meets with unsteady, there is the lot of physical forms. And guest

  and guessed are one to me: whether the sky or whether the lake.

  I feel before I want to know: water stays fluid below the frost,

  and silver quiets the jargoned heart.

  Long in the wild of new-ending winter, the exhumed fletcher

  could step out

  showing his armful of arrows

  Is He Decently Put Back Together?

  If there is nothing half-assed about the redbud tree, she can be beside it

  compositionally, in the form of a spring tableau. See her female

  receding to a slight power. Coefficient before a vivid variable,

  amplifying, as will the May wind, a purple of the bark-

  bearing flowers.

  Was it happening to be there, or coming to act

  in keeping with one’s nature? Who has thought that a soul

  is a list of things to be done? Far into the color

  of a scene’s exaggeration, the lagoon is reading

  dreadful words to itself. Looking glass

  for the apple in flower,

  for that cost of the sky on its surface.

  Under the Veil of Wildness

  Draw the curtains for candescence.

  The antlers were forged by the silversmith.

  The sun slips off

  auroras, illumines branches of extinction.

  Do you call the main body marker: a standing

  as if instead of? Or else a thing stooped

  down upon, and loved? Beneath the tree

  a childhood coffer, a penny

  and an acorn smell. I call the main body

  bramble: verging glow of a crusted switchbox,

  on and off until a kind of ending comes.

  Looking quietly at a trumpet, a flared bell,

  a blackness encompassed by brass, you say Wait.

  Looking back to the prickers, to the fruit-

  picking hand, can you say

  Enough? I call the main body

  espoused: line of symmetry inside, trench

  between two lungs, for the twoness of, the two-

  timedness of breathing.

  Under the tree, a childhood coffer,

  a stashing and a rooting spell.

  By oxygen-drawn sheerness into red,

  I call the branches to describe themselves.

  A body is mainly its branches—

  branca claw paw hand—

  its tender

  and untender branches.

  Coming to the Festival of the God of Boundaries

  Helios the mute, the keen in Pan’s knife.

  Some time critical at the bending stream, where he cuts the reeds

  at staggered lengths and with the beeswax

  begins to bind them.

  Beneath the humanly shaped air is an animal’s

  report of feeling.

  Then for the first time saying or.

  Turning your instrument toward the tree, all the training comes up

  as something just below your skin, yet within the business

  of the sun. You could be readily alone,

  you could be difficult to reach or speak to,

  at present included in the subsoil production, where Mercury

  scythes the head off Io’s warden, Argus, whose every hundred eyes

  under the messenger’s messenger voice

  caves to a slumberous feeling.

  In such a beautiful piece

  for reeds, it is all ears under the architected

  bridal veil, our trinkets working to the surface of earth.

  The earth, too,

  and moreso tidal, tidal in the congregate

  shifts of grazing, tidal in the turn of plow, itself a substance

  for the moon’s compactments.

  Her own voice frightens her. In lowing hearing herself low.

  Her father feeds her grass, swats a fly

  from her eyelash.

  The border completely herbaceous. Quantities of sun

  later to be crushed from borage.

  To wedge a story inside a story. To cut the trunk radially.

  Argus, whose every hundred eyes heard Syrinx running

  into sound, Syrinx being chased by everywhere.

  Staggered lengths of story.

  And does the god have a mind of his own,

  Pan in the needles, the unthinkable pine wreath,

  a ubiquity darkly seductive of breeze?

  Along her various edges, between obvious and audible and covetous,

  the rarely dissected textures, fog is condensing into water

  on the hardened forewings (shards)

  of darkling beetles.

  For the reinstatement of a hundred eyes, the covert feathers

  snapping into courtship.

  Now you: you now.

  If affluence

  speaks into the mouth, if the very long dead exceed our energy?

  In the room adjoining the living room, the offer to play

  the nocturne over.

  You now: now you—

  Makes an Arrangement

  Of many stems, the water, lukewarm, the water whose irenic ladder down

  to a slant clip in going giving to the stem a greener opening

  who gives a period

  and gives to live in lost continuation

  of oneself, sticks caught

  in peace of stones, in clouds shaped as a windpipe

  at a no more foreign accent

  true in the woods

  there is in trillium, a wild against the skin

  and body the very gesture could be true, body drawn truce

  in the pencil-looks of life, from nature

  drawn and made of water—drawn of rush, copper, salt—of flowers the earth

  why not bestow
s

  what makes me know

  in a faucet hue, could silver

  warm to be a hue (to bird down, beauty, hide)

  time and water rooming

  in the ewer base, then you (good

  god) is true, and futures on the glass of flower cooler, and past,

  a glass (in time comes in), a second-seeded eucalyptus, and drops

  on glass, and split-off thoughts, on cooler door,

  diminutives of mass—

  the molecules, the hand-shaped streaks

  Return of the Native to the Widespread Hour

  In her yellow caravan, the feather merchant has sold out of wares.

  Ambitious only to feel her coat’s inner lining, in performing one

  normal action backward, she sublimes, she goes beneath

  the oldest stone, she greets the interruptive

  shake before duration.

  Breathe on a harpsichord, and it will sound.

  Sink a chunk of salt on your tongue to name the ocean.

  The swan’s distinctive contour will pinpoint the sky.

  So her resources are wanting to reach her:

  knowing with a red cloth tied at her neck

  where leafage is system to leaves.

  Midlander

  this region that moves the voice is made of ears

  so that a region we are born to

  sounds like listening and we seem even older

  when we speak this way—like a glow of clay compressed—light

  as the hiddenness of the nonapparent

  sun being wind along the leaves—among pieces of recognition—

  bootprints that said footsteps on the day’s clean floor—a flox’s

  violent blue—a word or two more valuable

  than those surrounding it or them

  because made of what we eventually are (that is the region

  a region expanding the accent inward)

  glass washes up soft

  in fields that are folds of waves for you

  without edges to see and weigh it lightly (you)

  so that nearer to the heart (for me

  to say it) is not coming or going but is

  the lasting dissolution made particular

  as sea glass in the whole blue

 

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