Spells. Annie Finch
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letters, hands, faces, symbols, stars.
Each warm friction’s vibration circumscribes
One more seat in the clearing where we are
Gathered, circling a home we can’t describe.
What’s the word but a word that can’t be spoken?
Who’d tear pleasure out past life’s iron bars?
Where’s the use of a code that won’t be broken?
A ring of keys hangs like a question at your side.
You move through the answering darkness like a key,
While windows of moonlight branch down the catacombs
And rustle each prisoner into mystery.
Each lock, like each room, is alone till the opening comes;
Your ring reaches one, then another. Liberty
Repeats down the corridor, doors pulled open wide,
Exploding more showers of sweetness through the combs
Whose locks had been waiting for one key to be tried.
BEACH OF EDGES
A drift of snow edges a new drift of sand
As edges grow deeper. It’s March, month of edges.
Wet rocks yield to pebbles like opening hands.
The glisten of rockweed trails, splutters, and bends,
And sparkles of rivulets bounce down in ledges.
A drift of snow edges a new drift of sand;
It’s March, month of edges, and I’m left to stand
Alone outside time as new light pulls and nudges
Wet rocks. Yield to pebbles like opening hands,
Light; pull me from winter. How have I planned
For light that’s not winter, for live light that fledges
A drift of snow, edges a new drift of sand
Beyond my last sight, and waves me like a wand
Out back over the surges of these rocking sedges?
Wet rocks yield to pebbles like opening hands;
I want to go back to him, as to the land;
light, carry me over from the wild old grudges.
A drift of snow edges a new drift of sand;
Wet rocks yield to pebbles like opening hands.
EARTH DAY
All we want is to find the love
in the faces of the people we love.
All we need is to find the dark
in the nighttime sky, to lie down to sleep
in the darkness, where stars and moon keep vigil,
in the silence of a sleeping earth.
All we require is to wake to sunlight
in the morning, to simple sky,
to breathe aloud as the sky is breathing,
to drink the water of the earth.
All we need is to touch the planet
and find it clean where we were born,
where our ancestors breathed and planted,
where we live with the plants and birds.
All we need is to live with the memory
of a future we want to imagine.
All we want is to find the love
in the face of the planet we love.
REVELRY
Chairs root. Their trunks are runged with snow.
Curtains grow velvet thick, like bark,
in this warm landscape ringed with dark.
Is passion only revelry?
Voices believe words and move free.
Lust moves our lips. Blood fills our skin.
We bend alive around cup and cloud.
These are the hours to revel in.
ARCHITECTURE
Proportion is life measured open by harmony.
It vaults us to open like atriums, entering
our pillared awareness in footsteps, then building
our spaces with conscious decision. Its mystery
makes earth that our forest looks back for. Its beauty
has felt us repeating, then come to repeat us.
Its answers have carved us like mineral and bent us
in spirals. Its questions have rocked us past symmetry.
And, if we have voices that build to a word
and breathe out through poems, it comes to enclose us
by seeding the places we know we inhabit—
(make local, remember, name, touch and are stirred
in, share with those who understand, love, or oppose us
(because they live here, in the place we inhabit,
and believe what we have grown wise believing:
that belief, like love, rests on no foundation
but the shapes we know how to make by knowing
how they enclose us))—
how they unfold us.
Poems, 2000–1990
Point your fire like a flower.
WATCHING THE WHALE
A hard gray wave, her fin, walks out on the water
that thickens to open and then parts open, around her.
Measured by her delved water, I follow her fill
into and out of green light in the depth she has spun
through the twenty-six fathoms of her silent orison,
then sink with her till she rises, lulled with the krill.
Beads of salt spray stop me, like metal crying.
Her cupped face breathes its spouts, like a jewel-wet prong.
In a cormorant’s barnacle path, I trail her, spun
down through my life in the making of her difference,
fixing my mouth, with the offerings of silence,
on her dark whale-road where all green partings run,
where ocean’s hidden bodies twist fathoms around her,
making her green-fed hunger grow fertile as water.
PARAVALEDELLENTINE: A PARADELLE
For Glen
Come to me with your warning sounds of the tender seas.
Come to me with your warning sounds of the tender seas.
Move me the way the seas’