Read Green is the Orator Online
Authors: Sarah Gridley
a whole statuary sing.
To the left of the linden in June, to the left of the graveyard's
human quiet
a neighbor worked a pneumatic hammer.
It was left to the ocean to matchstick the hull,
left to the darkroom to develop the trees.
I am not choosing
between function and ornament.
Were there
a parasol. Were it ribbed to shed
a painful brightness from the eyes.
Could it spread its flowers at the shining
waves, you could open it now,
if you cared to.
Moon to light the spaces of the glossary. Birdless oak
of folded wings, shadows clotting the moon-green crown.
Meal of a moth, out for the moon.
Meal of a fish and a thorn apple's nectar.
Meal of milk.
Piecemeal.
Moon to light the loophole in mammalian
laws of gravity. Not hand or wing
in the oak. Not
home:
home in.
Not a concept, much less a faithâ
not quiet
but coming forward from the dust, a white mare
partially bone, primarily fast in the higher field.
And was the sound of snow dissolving,
glass being blown from lips of beginners?
Where by
love
I mean a failing, copious
and opaque, heart without a practical power
most feeling the gives of undone.
Fountain and basin, the water penned in,
the tension to ring where the water
turns down, where the beads
are cracking our sun's white codex
in the courtyard foreign beyond
the window, plurally into something else.
When I live on the look of muteness, where I lived
on the look of happiness,
rose that was quantaâ
I ask after costâafter gouge of grass
and sky, after cause
that hides its cause
in unsustainable shapes of pain,
in tempos habituating grass,
redbud trees in arriving and splittingâ
accost, accost, come closer to my ribs.
Not only the understanding
has a language, be it wind
in rings of meanest direction,
or deepest remove when bluest in surface.
By
memory
I mean a skin: a cover
for the underworlds
that we might try to breathe,
or hear in wind a single,
soothing thing,
or hear of wind a kindred displacementâ
in our skins to the added
subtractions we live in, sun over sand, the coppered hem-
wetness, sun in tons of bells, in apples cut open
to disappearâyes, now I am listening
to your fallible sounds
pity for the you that is stranded,
pity for the you that is only
a voice, where now I am hearing
a mechanical click
to see I had no beautiful shelter
the motioning colors of the trees, the edgewise
pit before beginning
to take up
listening as something harder, to take up
walking as something longer
attach me, walking, attach me
On the strength of its first thread, a spider commits
design, commits its body's lengths to measurements of silk.
There is a hard work you ate in honey.
There is a hard work in parts of speech. In turning your heart
to a pulpit, you captured a sample of persuasion: gray, the passenger
pigeons, the migrateurs, gray the epigraphical palettes, the small,
uncertain laughter at the cages of doves.
Where is now the feeling of the law, human in
the dullest outline? The errand is all about you: a demon sings,
the song is yours, a fog catcher catches condensation.
In the law of truce and probability.
In the law of the horse coming down from the hill. A left-out word like
gossamer. A word left out
like grace.
Interior shades suggesting evening: dark pink like an anatomical page,
dark pink
like an ivory lampshade.
A word, then, for who will conquer it ?
To the hands suggesting prayer, cream white corymbs
of the rowan in flower. Law of soft, and softer work.
Law of excavation. Faintest in
its truest outline, law of the coming thing.
This takes hold of soil and here. In the same way sun
flowers the sea, in the same way seeds
lie in the light. A buoy bell rocks
above a farm's long furrows. Granite is over
and under the living. Through a loom
leaned on a sunlit wall, warp-ends weighted
down with clay, a Monarch works
as floating through, as saying to, as otherwise.
Could I pass all words through the end of seeing,
new would rise to speak of working.
New moon, full stop, black-apple phase.
Will grow a crescent presence over days, will give
(by light) your name to snow
and blossom.
Soft bouncing of the paper lights. A pair of shutters
unhooked from the inside.
I cut you a reed, I pass you a pipe.       I wish you a waterway unnatural.
We have talked over time on the movement of swans:
canal a form of irrigation
                           canal a form of transportation. In this sense
we are certain companions: in my ears
we are breaking bread.
There are hours when a creek
crops brightest from rocks. The exchange of gifts
known as
nothing is missing
.
There's a marsh most its own
without the sun
in a
then
like a lord of appearance
. There's a contour that grazes
merely on rainâ
dead bone of antlers lowered in darkâ
a doubting that blurs the demarcation,
& the raising, hazeled in headlights.
Brief sparrow, rye-light, what is your stance? The air
in memoriam stings. The sun has all it needs.
At the liquid side of firs, on the snowy wind,
is there its spring, in the open cold, a renaissance,
a resin coming in to lung
to stick awhile in rocky apses?
Off course, such a long way in, what Providence
in the body's corpus, in the revolutionary second hand?
Voice from the flanks of avalanche. And another under
the slit of waves.
Killer your blue, an optic banner cloudless skyâ
the stand the wait
on the wordless slope
that gives no sign of being burial.
This Daniel & lionâthose carnelian steppes in cameoâ
that tomorrow you put my hands out for.
I have a splinter.
I have it well. That love might call me more than fear, I feel,
I think, the preferential scatterings. Blue photons
like a camera in a river. Air for the ribbon
to fall through. Fire to light
survival's finish.
It is possibly warmer than Hades in here.
Sewn to slats of whalebone,
a rainbow brightening air, what remains of the Carolina Parakeetâ
saffron, lemon, viridian
âa wrist snaps open to fan.
Small miracles go out in summary. At last the opera curtain rises,
and most of the house, after clearing its throats, goes still.
The
tin man
gene is said to make a fly's heart.      Â
Seeing that it will eat the dead, evolution (not to say
beautifully
)
bares the vulture's head. The tenor exhales
a high C forte.
When the lyre was fished from the violent river, the stars took
wing around it. Near Draco and Cygnus, we can choose which bird
we imagine falling.
                          Â
Aquila cadens, Vultur cadens
To make the heart fly, the barn owl opens
its face in trees.
Or passes the mallows in other namesâ
delicate owl      straw owl      rat owl      death owl
To swing from a broken current. Knob, the brass apple,
for this side of rooms. Oak tree thick in the door.
Atlantic, the holding of breath. Airtight
in gutta-percha gum, the telegram
comes out of the water. The nap is stopped
from going deeper. A rowboat, a fin,
a coming feeling.
Bright thread in dry fingers.
Absence tapping its home and twilight.
No one touching the piano.
Unmistakable shape upon the eye, the kite is far above me, a black tail
deeply forked. Inside what follows, within the feeling of the river,
the kite might go from flesh to fruit, from frog, from nestling,
to fig, or pawpaw.
Follow a bird aboard its shadow, by the carry of its cry, into the angle
of its kill.
Only something that has no history can be defined
.
Kee-kle-klee
. Deeply forked, the black tail. Sharp shape upon the eye,
and closer still, blue-black with, in growing light, the underworldly
reign of iridescence.
When I shake with purpose, I have no idea. Spring could be
a set of days. Or a strand of being
the wind knows how to play.
This could be immature forever, the rufous bloom of its upper breast
not to fade how things fade in the sea.
Why I shake with purpose, I have no idea.
Why I keep such keys.
Continuous coming through the doors, sounds for the hallway's
unlit feeling.
Museum darkness has its natural history. Back in the planetarium,
I am pretending closer to the exotic classes, the blue stragglers
in much higher temperatures.
The audience extends from there. A silhouette crop,
washed in what looks like television.
I came through my birth a little bit ragged. My feeling comes spacey
or faintly populous. I can't say
souls
and know what I'm saying. Still,
Tiffany glass has fumes inside it: every Sunday's daylight
knows this.
Ummm
goes the Venetian piva. I look to the doge enfolding the balcony.
The lutes like halves of pears have stopped.
That was no game of hangman.
Now what will he put in the sky?
A book of all moons. The shadows in Galileo's head.
The body is always being educated.
Theater is like this. The planetarium is like this.
The whale is not hurt or in any way ruined.
The whale is a great lightness.
In the unrehearsed glimpse of the brown bottle is the habit of sun to spot
everything.
You have caught the orange mood
flouting closer earlier.
Where the gardener calls his raised bed
Moon garden
        â
    Where the hyssop's square stem, the drawn-from
career of cloud, a light whipped over in aspect of wall â
bare barrier
(call name, wait for hand)
In the start of autumn, hips in the roses.
In the door made foreign by a pattern of grain. In the divers forms
of calling attendance.
Nothing to gossip over: white oak shadows, a current
manifolding gold. As was the news
from nowhere: the vegetable dye, the longerwhile
of replication, to weave of the river,
Evenlode
.
There is no place the mourning cloak lifts up.
There is nowhere the question mark doesn't light down.
The tent is on fire
with all you have owned: the known
to be useful, the believed to be beautiful.
The oak lobes are.
The river is. The earth will have us.
Repeat and repeat.
Outside the sediment in the broadest sense. Inside we make
in talk and smoke
a fire to drink and gaze inside of.
When you reach for the glassâ
wake like the waterbirds make in fall
maple-maple on the water
love like a pond on the heart of my brain
âshall I move in it  Â
unusually tailored, in my only suit dyed to a wood duck's green?
Can we watch us walk in the drinking mirror
[or bite or fly or make a warning call]
in the oval measure of the fiery
place (no pond) (no grass), the oiled wood booths
(no grass) (no edge)
âcan we watch us go for a glass of beerâyou in my vest
as I reach for your glassâ
shank crown         arm fluke
âthe anchor at
the end of glass?
the comb gave out a different honey
when the farmer went under
the fallow acre
and they told his bees with a black cloth flag
1849âa camp chicken's gizzard made gold disclosures
it had been eating gold
somewhere where
sun changed water to water
{gain-}
what survives of a once-common prefix
no longer active in compoundsâ
{say}
the load of hay approaching
is wished upon
the wish is to be fulfilled
when the bale is broken open
Though the moon is no saw it shows a taste for wood
it ranges through wood as deep as blood, blood
still good for building astonishment.
Sail that goes
behind a crop of coast. How crops and enlargements
get in to the useful. Squirm of sail