I have a favorite kind of poem in January: origin poems, fables, midrash. After all, the first month of the year is the time to begin again. Or at least to imagine one can begin again. Today I’ve been reading and rereading this sonnet by Diane Raptosh, which is the opening poem in her collection, I Eric America, forthcoming from Etruscan Press. I love the feel of it, the song of it, the surprises in her lines, the promise of an epic to come.
In this origin story, the moon crowns three people:
the mother, her children. In the original glory
a girl might birth her own brother. In this roiling
storehouse: relics from Delos, Sicily. Safe vests
for travel to Mars. In origin-storage: bloodroot.
Wet bulb. Torsi. Here and there worry seeps in
to rewrite the corm of the fathers. In its oaring
through woe, the tale will take in some deer. A dog.
This story’s original flora count locusts. Dogwood.
Fir trees. This tale refers to the genus of shrub
artemisia, holy mother of absinthe. Don’t you just
love how absinthe abs its way right smack into the
in the—exactly how epics start out: In the beginning,
maybe a girl ago, an original glory brined everyone kin—
Another and very different poem that caught my attention is this delightful prose poem, “Dream in a Garden” by Jeff Friedman from his new collection, Ashes in Paradise. Like many of Friedman’s poems,this one made me laugh out loud. I love Friedman’s playfulness, his implied question, whose dream are we in? And his line, “We’re not in a garden. We’re in a dream of a garden.” The poem reminds me of philosophy classes on existentialism—on the absurdity of human experience. And the greater absurdity of defining human experience.
Dream in the Garden
Satan came to him in a dream. He handed him a large shiny apple. “Take a bite, and you’ll know everything.” “I’m not Adam,” he answered. “You’ve got the wrong dream.” He threw the apple into the next garden, but as soon as it left his hand another apple appeared, just as red and shiny. “We’re in the garden,” Satan said. “There’s the tree of knowledge, and there’s a woman with lovely breasts following you, calling you Adam. I think I have the right dream.” “I’m not the only guy,” he replied, “with a naked woman with lovely breasts in his dreams. And we’re not in a garden. We’re in a dream of a garden.” “This is my dream,” Satan said. Now the woman held the apple, and she was hungry. Though the man ordered her to drop the apple, she ate in vigorously and tossed the core into the bush. “Delicious,” she said, “I’ll have another.”
Finally, on a more serious note, there is this beautiful poem from Jessica Jacob’s new book, unalone, in which she imagines Jonah’s time in the belly of a whale—something I often contemplated as a child after my friend, Mary Welby informed me that her mother had proof that a man could live inside a whale.
Torn Mind
A rabbit savaged in the field, my mind
is that torn, that scattered.
All dog-paddle day, all surface
and screens, I sink sometimes
but bob back up.
Someone, somewhere
needs an answer.
Not bold enough to run from destiny,
I let it seep from me instead.
So though he shivered in the briny dark,
krill wreathing his ankles, I find
I am jealous of Jonah.
Like Nineveh, I am a city in need of saving.
Like Jonah, I have words stuck
in the scrim of my ribs
and the whale seems
an ideal retreat—
three days, three nights
at a depth I can barely imagine.
The whale, both vessel and message:
to settle into time like it does
into water. To patient
beside the rumbling pump room
of the heart. The quiet there
like God—nowhere and everywhere
at once. The holiness of that
wholeness. Of what rises to meet it.
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Author: Nin Andrews
