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    The Illustrated Edge
    The Illustrated Edge
    The Illustrated Edge
    Ebook88 pages34 minutes

    The Illustrated Edge

    By Marsha Pomerantz

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A BOSTON GLOBE BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2011

    The poems in this collection inhabit several countries or no country at all, but many are concerned with boundaries: between words and silence, one person and another, today and tomorrow, freedom and fear. Although the poems rarely employ traditional forms of rhyme and repetition, their sound is the engine that propels them, while invented visual shapes intensify the experience of reading. All of these experiments are concerned with how art works, what it requires of us, and what it gives back. As the cow in a gallery tells the viewer: "Feed me, please, / your possibilities, / and I will fatten you."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBiblioasis
    Release dateJun 14, 2011
    ISBN9781926845777
    The Illustrated Edge

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      Book preview

      The Illustrated Edge - Marsha Pomerantz

      I

      The Illustrated Middle

      Acacia

      Central Highland, Kenya

      1

      Yes, says Suleiman, met along the way,

      write about all these live things

      and the African man telling you

      this. There is sound around his

      words, on the highland subliming

      in the morning, blunt sun glancing off

      his glasses, cooking his camouflage

      jacket as he tilts along the animal

      tracks in his Reebok knockoffs,

      too absorbed with a lion-paw print

      on buffalo dung to name eddies

      of air. I can’t write the sound down.

      So hear, please, a hooshing

      in the grass, a ratcheting on pebbles,

      some woo-waw from a branch.

      Then know: it’s none of these.

      2

      I open a door and this comes in:

      wind, clouds, dizzy grass, oryx

      pointing, tickbirds picking.

      I want some of it

      out, want to pluck things from

      their red-ochre ground, leave

      the red-ochre dust outside

      the door. (You don’t know

      how many times I’ve

      swept out this life.) Some

      ants and birds will not

      inhabit the same tree.

      That I live here too,

      in this life, with its door,

      leaves my throat ajar.

      3

      Stinging ants live in galls:

      apartment nodes bulging

      on acacia branches. All

      the amenities, though you

      would think the thorn tree

      is nowhere to nestle. Still, I

      take my cue from its spindly

      limbs bridging air and air—

      as mine do—with their spines

      spiny and their leaves tiny,

      so as to transpire less.

      4

      Suleiman tells us Don’t touch,

      then taps the tree with his stick,

      and ants emerge en masse

      from pinhole doorways to greet

      their guests. Like Abrahams

      from their tents, I would say, but

      that would make us three callers,

      awkwardly, angels. It’s not eternity

      I’m trying to grasp, only the open

      doorway, airflow undaunted by

      the thorns of an abode or the toxins

      of the abider. No annunciation,

      transpiring is all. That I live here

      too, in this life, with its door,

      opens.

      What the Tenor Does with His Hands

      Sometimes sketches out a winter sun

      and covers it with cumulus,

      then from the center gently cleaves

      a cloudbank, leaving listening women

      exposed like an icy harbor, men

      straining toward a steamy cove.

      Sometimes it is fall in the tenor’s hands

      and they keen over lost leaves, then

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