Green is the Orator

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

 

 

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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.

PS
3607.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 Z
39.48–1992 (
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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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