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[QUOTES] [POETRY] Nancy Jo's Poetry: Collecting My friend is a collector of beads she is a jeweler an artist but the collecting comes first elaborate expensive Venetian glass Pink and pearl chalcedony Amethyst quartz jasper emerald jade rubies cats' eyes coral silver giant piles of beads to string in intricate patterns and colors I am a collector too I collect words sometimes alone sometimes strung together I find them everywhere in poems in books The Sunday New York Times Book Review book lovers reviewing books use their best words and I collect them "memory holes" "sporadic rifes on moral rectitudes" "turbulent investigation" "staring at sound" "rival reverends" "ancient necessities" "international claustrophobia" "cassowary quills" "caravan of camels" "euphoric possibilities of the sacred." I circle them squirrel them away in small notebooks on the back of napkins sometimes just in my head words of colors apricot magenta champagne brick cardinal crimson small words like dirt dust hobo star growing to spice shrewd necrotic molten potent tentative tabasco blood and smell lepidopterist Bodhisattva silence Collecting words befriending them turning them over and over I no longer confuse words with the world: the wordless bowl full of alphabet soup can be eaten from with confidence. Queen of Mud I would not choose to be Queen of anything else but Mud not Queen of the Nile or even the Mississippi just the rich soil full of microbes worms roots and dark aromas Mud matches my eyes In my dream a small girl is running and falling she has brown eyes On my TV she is dead on the streets of Baghdad covered in a mixture of blood and Mud Shocked and awed blind by brute force The reporter says this is what we have been waiting for. We all rise up and fall down into Mud over eons rocks got smart moved through all life became tender-hearted learned to love. As Queen of Mud I command humanity out into the Mud fall down on the earth and look in the sky lose your name and nationality know you are the same nature as clouds and stars. I know as you read this you do not believe in Mud But even presidents generals terrorists mothers daughters fathers sons will all be Mud soon. As Queen of Mud I invite you to my castle We will roll in Mud eat Mud pies wallow in love. Enchantment On New Year's Day 2002 I am revelatory in life's abundance/ vibrant sky filled with warblers inlet on the sea of god a pilgrim of 'firm persuasion' spinning webs of numinous gravity. Defiant of shadows that render my invisibility. Unutterably myself. Faithful to my own strange nature. Elegant in eccentricities. Aglow with ancestral embers. Conversing with death as I awake to immortality. Giddy at the gaudiness of a universe of three hundred billion galaxies swirling rhinestone dervishes. Celebrating my incarnation brimming with immense joy and sorrow. And in the first light of evening stars roused in the indigo heavens, continue my search for the origin of desire. Blessings on this extravagant mystery. Blessings on you and all that you love. The Day Eudora Welty Died The day Eudora Welty died A meteor lit up the entire eastern sky The CNN correspondent saw it streak by A window in the Pentagon A balding man on TV Excited to the point of stuttering Said it was like a flying refrigerator on fire Its sonic boom and eerie high pitched song Shattering windows from Boston to New York The meteor landed in the proverbial cornfield In Williamsport, Pennsylvania The green stalks filled with dead bugs And strange marking from burnt cosmic dust My sister and her child dreamed it days before The day Eudora Welty died I learned the universe is mostly dark matter And dark energy making it all spin The scientist with arching eyebrows And wild eyes said the darkness seems to come From absolutely nothing at all Eudora, it all sounds like God to me. |
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