Read Green is the Orator Online
Authors: Sarah Gridley
where the
salubrity
of the water is being determined,
where a squid is blacking in the margins, where dolphins arc
and go below, where all our options are not the sameâ
transparencyâsemitransparencyâ
opacity
â
and all our options
are not the sameâ
healthfulness, wholesomeness
,
nutritiousness, salubrity
â
soundness, aptness
,
rightness, goodness
.
Under whose ascending rungs
the interior is gutted
                           and started again.
Modern. Sustainable. Minimal.
Â
Lady of the smokebush,
gray in the act of mauve.
Don't move.
There is a worse thing,
I wager, than being seen.
Desire is to indifference as indifference, to aversion.
Who is moved to encounter is in the beginning
at home in all shapes before the end. Shine a distance
on this working sail: in the beginning was the making
of ships, and the ships were made
by the grace of trees.
Off-broken earth, moon of long measures, appear to us
to help us appear.
Little Dipperâ
Extravagant utensil.
the purpose is not to explain the significance of words
they being apparently obscured by the clouds
in endless succession, rolling darkly down the stream
in which were many luminous points similar
they being apparently obscured by the clouds
often experienced on rising suddenly
in which were many luminous points similar
and stretching out the arms
often experienced on rising suddenly
after sitting long in one position
and stretching out the arms
incapable of speaking
after sitting long in one position
consciousness of where I was
incapable of speaking
who was near me
consciousness of where I was
my whole frame
who was near me
I thought I panted violently
my whole frame
I felt a singing in my ears
I thought I panted violently
as if their velocity had been suddenly accelerated
I felt a singing in my ears
the bursting of a barrier
as if their velocity had been suddenly accelerated
the actions of inspiring and expiring
the bursting of a barrier
in which were many luminous points similar
the actions of inspiring and expiring
they being apparently obscured by the clouds
Thatchwork. Threnody. Theogeny. The earth in all its ill-
imagined parts
                       Â
did issue does issue will issue
Sleeping out of doors in the out-of-doors
     Â
        Â
        Â
the rest is made of what
I.
In the spring of 1799, at age twenty, following his self-administration
of nitrous oxide, Roget wrote in his report to the Pneumatic Institution,
I cannot remember that I experienced the least pleasure
from any of these sensations. . . . And as it is above two months
since I made the experiment, many of the minuter circumstances
have probably escaped me
.
Humphry Davy, a year older than Roget,
and the Institute's superintendent,
found that inhalations effected desirable
changes in his poetry. Breathing nitrous oxide
while walking the hills at Clifton,
near Bristol, he composed lines like these:
Yet are my eyes with sparkling luster fill'd;
Yet is my mouth replete with murmuring sound;
Yet are my limbs with inward transports filled;
And clad with newborn mightiness around
.
[contemporaries Coleridge and Southey are meanwhile envisioning
the banks of the Susquehanna as the site of their pantisocracy.]
II.
In our childhood, my brother and I had teeth pulled
under laughing gas. As we came back to thinking
in a shared recovery room, we roared at everything that moved,
or spokeâor did an absurd impersonation of doing both.
III.
To arrive at the core of “green” in my thesaurus
I go through the thinking of “greenness”â
virescence, verdancy, verdure
âthrough the feeling of green placesâ
sward, park, greenbelt, turf
âthrough the music of its pigmentsâ
celadonite
,
chlorophyll, viridian
â
through ephemera of green thingsâ
chrysoprase, spinach, putting green
â
through green figures
of speechâ
greenroom, greenhorn, green thumb
â
to compounds escaping
parts of speechâ
Nile-green, leek-green, sea-greenâ
lime-greenâdull-greenâleaf-green
.
IV.
The last of Roget's major labors, begun in 1849 in his seventieth year,
and published in 1852 as
The Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases
,
had few detractors. One of these, E. P. Whipple, said this
of the work in the
North American Review:
Seriously, we consider this book as one of the best
of a numerous class, whose aim is to secure the results without
imposing the tasks of labor, to arrive at ends by a dexterous
dodging of means, to accelerate the tongue
without accelerating the faculties
.
It is an outside remedy for an inward defect. In our opinion, the work mistakes
the whole process by which living thought makes its way into living words
â¦
In the mind of Whipple, Roget's
Thesaurus
made a dangerous move
to separate words from feelings,
to shrivel up language
into a mummy of thought.
V.
Using his knowledge of biological classification, Roget had,
one must admit, done something backward, plotting every word
of the thesaurus, by outline and tabular organization,
into six major classes
of ideas:
   I. Abstract Relations
  II. Space
 III. Matter
IV. Intellect
 V. Volition
VI. Sentient and Moral Powers
To get
to
the words,
he forked ideas into sections and heads, so that under
class IVâ“Intellect”âone would have found under section II,
Precursory Conditions and Operations
,
the following “heads”:
Curiosity
Incuriosity
Discrimination
Indiscrimination
VI.
Having left the “irregular” Institute behind,
Roget was, a few years later, wearing green glasses against the glare
in trips beyond Geneva
                to see the glaciers.
I am a field enduring, growing wheat one year, barley the next, tangled flowering papyrus, a hill of sand. I am everafter, changing, while the eye of the watcher shines and takes me in.
In the great while under
the monkey puzzle tree, the mockingbird learns
to rusted gate. He will not go so far. He will not find the words.
But will his throat, not rust, but taking its time to sound,
leave, in tracks of rain, a color of rust inside you, or make, as if
he knew, the air a means of import?
From the chanting bird, from the word
stronger
â
from the funny tree, the evergreen.
                   Living fossil,
what has come over you?
It would puzzle a monkey to climb that
. The spiky
points, the injury.
Not far from the invention of fire, we must rank
the invention of doubt
.
     Who is here, is here. To abide. To be kind.
To be sound in skeptic combat with the stronger
sound of wavesâthe practiced sound of wavesâthe practical
     thinking there.
Thousands of rulers up
and the wings are a copied motility
and a cabin is for breathing above the earth
and for walking in on elsewhere.
Why not a horse
now that the fields are visible?
The sun is always
circling the story. Like how
you showed me
how the hummingbirds feed:
saying
This is a moat
                             and pointing
leading to accident. A child among knives, mallets, and punches.
The awl slips in his eye.
Morning that comes like an altered ear, according to birds,
according to coughs.
World that goes on beyond the evident. Vibrant rocks
at the edge of the brook. Radishes revolving in water. The butterfly duskiest
nearest the body
to keep the ovaries warm.
Louis Braille. This is how the stars move. This is how to set the table.
This is the smell of a heating oven. Listen and remember.
Slant rains all day, and thunder. At organ practice, crosswinds audible
through glass. Paris coming apart in bells.
How then?
Not reading
rive
on pins.
Not soldiers nightwriting in the dark.
The milk wagons wake him from a dream, a rope gang long enough
to wander Paris.
Louis Braille. Braille. The world goes on.
Six dots to a cell, and passages of it
raised above surface.
Is the oculus I omitted from the higher
story, the detailed forgetting of orbital bones.
Pinned thing, a common Pierrot,
heir to the room's declining momentum.
Close to finest ossicle,
The storm is being bargained down.
Window, you feel the last of it:
elucidation's dropping value, dark, the after-
thought of switch,
the fan in a flower of paddles.
Where the green pump calls for wonderful arms
to bring up water in iron gulps
pan left: to distant fluctuations, to hooves freaking
insects out of grass.
The soundtrack said:
You think your thirst
arcs from the waterspout when in fact
it arcs from the ground
.
Sinister, like a ventriloquist draining a glass of water
while making