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This Murmuring, by Joseph Stroud | Print |  E-mail
Written by Joseph Stroud   
Wednesday, 31 December 2008

Joseph Stroud is the author of five books of poetry; the most recent is “Of This World: New and Selected Poems,” from Copper Canyon Press. His work has earned a Pushcart Prize and has been featured in the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. In 2006, he was selected by the Poet Laureate of the United States for a Witter Bynner Fellowship in poetry from the Library of Congress.  He divides his time between his home in Santa Cruz and a cabin in the Sierra Nevada.

Joseph Stroud

Feral

The plaza of the Gypsies.  Under the ruined castle.  A spring pouring into a stone basin where burros and horses drink. Since before the time of Cervantes.  A taverna.  Fierce sunlight at noon.  The plaza empty.  Absolute stillness. Even the cicadas stunned by the heat.  A plate of olives, goat cheese, cucumber.  Cobblestones. Whitewashed walls. A day like marble.  Solstice.  Crushed rosemary. Holding on with everything I have.  Wheat fields the color of fawn.  Bread.  Black figs.  Gripping hard, with mind and heart clenching, holding on to what’s human.  This moment.  This place where I make my strict joy.

Lazarus in Varanasi

From a pyre on the burning ghat
a corpse slowly sits up in the flames.
As if remembering something important.
As if to look around one more time.
As if he has something at last to say.
As if there might be a way out of this.             

This Waiting

All morning I’ve been watching a bee among
the trumpet vines
thrumming from one bud to another,
brushing against them
as if desire alone would make them bloom.  
All morning
I’ve been waiting for the poem to appear
as it did for Rumi
when he beheld Shams of Tabriz, the Beloved,
and words
opened like daybreak, like chords of fire
within his body.

Lodestone

I lie in a hammock in the slow hours
of a summer day, summer at last
in the high country, summer in the air,
in the light, in the poems I’m reading,
poems like deep jade pools of snowmelt
under a summer sun, poems like
whorls of agate.  There’s a drift of pollen
through the forest, sifting through
the pines and cedars, a fine gold powder
drifting like the crushed ash of sunlight.  
In the seep on the hillside the first
rein orchids appear, the night-blue larkspur,
leopard lilies.  All summer the seep
will blaze with flowers under the flare
of sun over the Sierra.  The day turns
around a single shaft of sunlight
through the pines. There’s a whisper
of water from Shay Creek,
like the murmuring of voices
from far away, languorous voices,
honey-tongued, voices whispering
of summer, of stillness, the slow sound
of a heat-drowsed summer noon.  
A warm wind rises up the canyon,
sways the pines.  Clouds drift over.  
If my body were the needle of a compass,
it would point dead center into the deep,
invisible lodestone of this murmuring,
immense, summer day.    

Glad Day

Bees have built a hive in the wall of my shack.
I don’t want to argue anymore about prosody.
I don’t want to discuss Saussure, or the meaning
of meaning.  All I want is to imagine those bees
making a honeycomb inside my life — all I want
is the unbelievable taste of that wild honey.

Festival

We are at the gate above the river.
Peach trees surround the pavilion.
It is the time of the Emperor’s feast,
the bounty of his riches and exquisite ladies.
Over there is Li Po, drunk and sick
on rice wine. They unscroll the silk
before him. The crowd is quiet. Error
is not allowed. Li Po has to be held,
the brush shakes in his hand. Suddenly
the poem lurches out. A sword in sunlight.
Our broken machine of language at last
at flow with the river. Fireworks
and sparklers cast lights on the water.
Lamps are lit on the fragile trees.  
Do you see the Emperor, abandoned and alone,
in the crowd of weeping faces?

Against Surrealism

On the road to Luang Phobeng an elephant in chains stands on the flat bed of a truck shifting his weight at every bend over the river and under the trees where fox bats hang that in the market you can buy skewered on sticks grilled and dipped in a sauce of chilies and crushed limes next to river monitors living dragons their hind legs sewn together flicking blue tongues toward a stall stacked with bamboo cages the size of  fists each with a swallow inside a gift for the New Year when you walk to the edge of the Mekong and make a wish opening the little cage like opening your fist your hand suddenly bursting with song

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