elephants through morning mist tall grasses swamp deer
'In the elephant field / tall green ghost elephants / with your cargo of summer leaves / at night I heard you breathing through the window'
--Ghost Elephants p14 Break the Glass by Jean Valentine
~ Don't you ever think that I'm not crying, since you're away from me, Don't ever think I went free.
At first the goodbye had a lilt to it - - but it was a beheading.
BREAK THE GLASS by Jean Valentine » RATTLE: Poetry for the 21st Century:
Ghost elephant,
reach down,
cross me over—
The Young Mother
I’m sad, Warden
Are you sad
All you people looking out from the stern
Of the white ship Withholding
–I’ll take my babies
and swim
as with rosy steps the morn
Everyone
on the other side of the earth
standing upside down, listening
Don’t listen to the words—
They’re only little shapes for what you’re saying,
They’re only cups if you’re thirsty, you aren’t thirsty.
these are lines I noted also. 'it was my dream too.'
along with:
'My, my coyote in the doorway'
--p18 Coyote
~'every coldness ever breathed had left its trace elements inside me
In the end, I laid them all down there at the leopard’s feet, I was glad to lay them down.'
--p7 The Leopard
~ 'I thought it's time to go into the forest with a bowl You are the forest and the bowl You don't need a bowl putting his cupped hands together - - the trees walking toward us'
--p47 I thought It's time
epigraph LORINE NIEDECKER
a pencil
for a wingbone
my notes from ~ two months ago, early October, this book a small hardcover being used for a class
here, BREAK THE GLASS by Jean Valentine » RATTLE, also:
If a Person Visits Someone in a Dream, in Some Cultures the Dreamer Thanks Them
Can you breathe all right?
Break the glass - shout
break the glass - force the room
break the thread - Open
the music behind the glass.
In his poem, “A Textbook of Poetry,” Jack Spicer wrote: “The ghosts the poems were written for are the ghosts of the poems. We have it secondhand. They cannot hear the noise they have been making.”
