Origin

All the deepest magics are bred upon the hearth.

Warm brick and whistling kettles,

story-tongued salamanders leaping to climb chimney walls

only to fall back down as crumbling soot,

Almost before they have driven us

out of Dark and into Dream

guiding here and there by rough words, few, unsteady, and dim.

Tomorrow, behind porridge gently steaming in the pale dawn,

a bitterer curse may brew;

and all day the evening meal will muse upon the spit.

Ordinary

by Sørina Higgins


my overcoat is a pelican
my umbrella is a stork
the flowers I plant have
grown down into the soil
their roots are enjoying the sun
and everything I have to say
pours back inside my lungs.

my garden is a laundry bin
my kitchen a game of chess
the dishes I feed you were
gleaned from a railroad
a transcontinental surprise
and every last sip I slip down my gorge
tastes like checkmate at sunrise.

my tires are elephant's knee-bones
my speakers house bumble wasps
when I taste between the sheets, feet
first through the sandwich of dark
nothing is missing its flavor and wine
of you and of you and of you
oak-gentle, gray-pillar, wind-eye.



Sørina Higgins is an adjunct English instructor at Lehigh Carbon Community College, an Inklings scholar specializing in Charles Williams, and a published poet. 'Ordinary' is from her latest collection, Caduceus.

Posted with permission.

The Benefit Race

for Team Je Me Souviens

They gathered in the pale before the dawn

Checking stirrup and strap, harness and helm,

Pack and saddle. They talked

Of last night's feasting.

Their cause is sober, so they drink;

The foe grim, so they jest.

Neither dour nor depressed,

Nor by some bleak humor possessed,

They are girded by what it used to mean to be free:

They go to war.

Not because war assures victory,

But because free people need not yield

That which they steward unfought. Free people

May meet the thief at hedgerow, stone wall, or boundary mark:

Even alone; even unarmed.

Ungently is how they choose to honor fellows

Drawn in part or in whole into that good night before the hour

Appointed. And now, at the signal, they mount up: they ride.

They, like Frost, have promises to keep

And miles to go before they sleep.

The Hollow Space Under the Stair

In the hollow space under the stair

spiders breed all unaware

of an untrimmed door set in the wall

behind the paint, narrow and small.

This door opens on meadows bright -

even while the household sleeps at night -

or, perhaps, on rainy days

where water licks at stony quays,

and houses lean across canals,

and ships return from hunting whales;

or else, broaching lands of trolls,

cracks wide the face of hoary knoll.

In the pantry, by the box of bread

someone has a flashlight hid;

close by it, on upper shelves

is tucked away - a book of tales.

I say not who, I say not when

might journey to an hour's end

from the hollow space under the stair -

and all the household unaware!

Folkdance

Sing we now all of our joy,

Dance we all together

Through the rocky mountain cleft,

'mid the purple heather.

Merry our folk, with clasped hands

Our feet sink down like roots;

Morning wind is in our hair,

Night wind in our flutes.

'twixt day and night we hold our jig

'tween night and day our harrow

Our tune has crooked you at the knee,

Our music's in your marrow

Death may be, to hear our horn

Winding in an eyrie-glen:

No mortal foot may quit our floor,

Nor return again.

Unfettered dance, loosed of time,

In seeming hours pass

Evening dew turns morning mist

Our footprints in the grass

Traipsing came, full-flushed youth,

Whose light step earned our praise;

Trembling leave, pale old man -

Last night ye danced your days.

Dance we now, all of our joy,

Sing we all together

In some forgotten mountain cleft

Just here, or there, or never.

for Venezia

My mind has become crowded with Venice

Its streets spoke out through my skull,

(As I'm sure you can see)

Labyrinthing prayers

In passageways shadowed between windowed stonework

Whose terminus is often in water, where echoes die away

I've no gondola to send them on

Past the quiet, past the lattices, past the forgetfulness

Which requires that I retrace

Curves to the square.

Beside me always the hassle, always the hustle,

Wheeling, ranting, raving, colors of cloths

Clever spidering lacemaker's snare,

Piano's plunk across the piazza,

Glint, glance, gilt and gleam of glass,

Multitudes melded to one melancholy Murano, corner to wall:

Trefoil sputtering lamp-lit stare of the lion on the quay.

Gelato is a kind of baptism

For those who would not normally confess;

Walking jeans and gauzy shoulders ply the busy wilderness

In supposed effortless resistance and all the signs suggest

At least you'll show something for what you have seen

Art and its many lucid motives, or madness,

Court and cathedral the mind.

Navigation and negotiation

Designate order of being,

Are displayed like nametags,

Fate experience and the balance of trade in the city of trade.

Between my thumb and forefinger is grasped

My pencil; between a pigeon feather and my wedding ring

The hookah violin's recreational Vivaldi, or

Scent of opera over the dark salt air

Between your thumb and forefinger

The futilely long nose

Of my mask.

Poet's Complaint

A murder of crows is all about me

I cannot think my way through the mutter

Of their wings. They sit

Hunched half in flight amongst the trees

Outside my window. They wing over

My car on every road. My grandfather

Had a crow carved in the top of his cane –

Its eye watched me grow up from between his fat wrinkled knuckles.

It has always been crows for me.

I cannot possibly write today.

Never that creature which the riddle presumed

Is like a writing desk; never omens from the one-eyed god

(Who still search out his guarantee among the slain), never

Night tapping for admittance.

It preens elsewhere, while crows

Blot out all my thought.

Concerning Endings

                     I

Policeman-car waits in the tall grass

between directions, coils thrumming

remains of a fresh kill nearby

mangled deer and crumpled hood

yellow lights signaling distress

attract its attention; purring, it

winds its way across the highway

flashing blue ears pricked:

authorized vehicles only...

Authorized vehicles only, on the next hill

a convocation of tractors,

low and still with silent riggings,

consider what becomes a free people

under the circumstances, when in the course...

one has a copy of Robert's Rules on its dashboard.

They are still there when the policeman-car passes,

muttering deep within their grills,

but they are allowed.

                    II

Ducks – no, sparrows – no, ravens circle

no; vultures over the desert

(a scene like a kite-field on a good windy afternoon)

call to one another above the wreck

of a ship run aground, from which

survivor sailors stagger and stumble.

From the mast swings the captain,

hanged in the mutiny, drowned in effigy

he danced beneath the crow's nest

(soon no more a figure of speech – he'll feed the chicks)

but he laughed last:

before the mutineers got him he fixed the rudder,

spun the globe beneath his finger and sent them where it stopped,

loyal with disloyal.

Those now alive wade among the shimmering waves of silver heat,

each dragging a sea-chest manacled to his ankle,

a line for every point of the compass,

four wakes in the sand.

One dreams of strawberries,

another of rosewater beside a gilded mirror,

the third shades his brow from the sunset,

and sees its ruddy light stain his hands the color of raw flesh.

The fourth has already collapsed.

Birds, swooping down, do not care how the ship arrived.

                    III

Green hills, ruffled by the fingertips of a passing wind,

soon resume subsuming all the footfalls

that rhythm atop them into underground libraries,

cadence upon cadence, slow writers.

They will read to one another all that was,

when the long dark has come,

in exquisite polysyllabic undulations.

Perhaps some one of them will say, with satisfaction,

that such midwinter rituals had been their idea 

from the start.

The Society

you were there and you remember

how it was: that high room with the tall chairs

and bar and open windows

she was there: standing at the window,

taken by the sunset's glory.

when night settled in velvet folds she would be ours;

'til then she was just a small soft smile, a murmured reply,

a curve of close-cropped head, a sip of somber wine,

and a faraway gaze brimming with beheld beauty. you remember

he was there too, broad-grinning champagne,

leaping from group to group with a tongue

long enough to precede him with a pun or burst of wit

and his brother also: who aside in stillness and silence would keep

the spirit of our gathering as well as any

you remember what it was like when they were all there,

that feeling of coming home

after a long campaign, wanting toast and eggs

our bellies would be full with harbored joy, with weary laughter

our mouths with smoke and red herrings

we would speak for love of words

and hear for love of the rhetorician

and we only lied when we were silent

you were there and you remember

clouds reflecting on the hardwood floor before the windows

just before dark, and the crystal glinting on the tables

in the moonlight as we left

in the dark, smudged platters like palettes with steel-handled brushes lying beside

and two left behind dancing to quiet music

when we returned the candles were lit and their ghosts were in the panes

opinion and oratory created unity

our perhaps unsympathetic symposium burnt

what could not earn its place using the empty aspersorium beside the bar

but our short shelves were deep, and doors hidden behind

gave way to whole rooms of thirst and thought

and this was our business:

there the world was ordered and what it brought forth we named

what it teemed with we named

what it separated we named

to the clink of glass, the rustle of paper, the lolling of tongue

clumsy, black-thumbed gardeners

culling the firstborn like angels of death.

We were there and I too

complicit in what we did and what we decided

and what we divided; in that high open room shaking off our dust

as if forgotten oddities in an attic had finally come alive

to reconvene at the witching hour, if it were known,

and compose under our nom de plume

in a place with no wall that bore a clock,

and a small pile of watches in the anteroom all ticking alone

like a mound of baking soda waiting for vinegar

like unfollowed dreams

like the aftertastes of wine and wit when dawn glimmered beneath the stars.

Never was often enough, yet oftener would have broken hearts

and though we yawn we also yearn, as cats do

and we are all ever-pregnant with pretenses of busyness and lives to see to,

other troubles to quiet in other places

but you were there;

you remember.

Fieldlight

Was it only a puddle
A puddle in the wheel-rut,
In the gutter by the wayside
That fired back my lantern-light like a retort
And my own quavering face
Like an accusation, “There goes a boy”
“A useless, silly creature”

Were they only wheel-ruts
Mimicking the furrowed shoulders of a bare-backed farmer
Who stoops to clear the path of his plow
Upon the spine of such a giant do I tread
With bloodied feet

Dusktime Driving

Minds have moved like long-legged flies upon silence;
mine soars against the singeing, screaming, smoking chords that are
vying with the headwind to fray the spider-strands spun across my open window, while
inexorably behind me come the endless windings and doublings 
of glimmer-pale and twinkling-yellow like the glowworm, hero’s-bane.


The sky ahead is slashed with cloud 
I spin a meditative egg-sac to trim it,
as a voice of gravel and dust licks out syllables that drop under comprehension,
flat on the grinding road.

Cold will come the rising dawn,
after all night riders of adulatory crowds
shall have thundered across the darkling highlands of my conscious dreams
to war with mile-long wights of boredom
that wait by the edges of pale roads andaround the corners of your eyes and
behind the full moon of their lids:
Standing as harbingers of a calm, overtaking doom.


Cold must be the seeping, ever-startling aura that wards off the deadly lull:
A herd of green-glinting feral reminders of your uttermost mortality,
a society that catches so quickly you react at thrice-thought speed,
blinking away the momentary impressions of a satyrs’ colony induced by sound of drums,
and cold is the wheel, the volume knob beneath those trembling fingers 
as the car stereo moves one decibel upwards and the regular swells of power lines flash by

hour
after hour
after hour.


Wake.
The road must have its end at last.

Time, Tolstoy, and Two Irish Poets

Published at http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/print.aspx?article=1121&loc=b&type=cbbp

Enjoy!

seeing you again

seeing you again was like

recalling some boyish trove

with all of the emotion that

the rediscovery of an empty beetle-shell,

dark and shiny, might inspire

I could not have left you where

I found you for love of my plans

to fill this hollow carapace with superglue

to remake you Whole and hopefully

to stick you to me in the process

and then maybe display you on a fine chain,

exotic scarab upon my chambered heart

but all you could do was crumble out of my touch

and my assumed gladness of last evening

was because a beetle-shell’s story ought not to have been

about me.

Fear

I will know you still when once we were young:
In my parlor, your graying hair pulled back into a bun,
We will talk, and smoke, and laugh, and after you've gone
In secret I'll slowly weep for the you you could
Have perhaps become

Weeping Cherry

Your dress was like a weeping cherry
My coat like eucalyptus,
When we rejoiced in this simplicity:
Drinking water from one brimming gourd.

The Diary

A little girl grew
Up on a sheep farm
By the side of the sea,
Sprawling along the cliff.

Ever since she learned
To write she wrote
On rocks for parchment practice
Letters which formed words

She was there like milkweed
Patiently feeding the caterpillars
Flinging her frustrations
Beyond the cliff: a little

Avalanche of charcoaled pebbles.
Later when she grew,
She chiseled her feelings.
In a hollow over the edge

Around which the transfigured
Sometimes gathered,
Her carved phrases piled
Like so many skulls.

Colin Trevor Smith

The winds bore aloft his soul
And they carried it to God
And I prayed He had given mercy
As freely as He had given death

Anthology

1/16th is just enough to claim legality
And just enough to earn the scorn of truer ancestry.
We Americans buy our heritage from the Celtic corner Shoppe,
Where they blend the Viking with the Irish and the Scot.
On stony grey asphalt of Monaghan Drive, no burglary took place
There I learned to read and write, to bike, to tag, to chase.
And I live now on Ulster Lane, its name, perhaps, a crime;
Chosen, I’m sure, for European allure, and through no fault of mine.
Only my youngest sister got your red hair, it missed me just by chance
Only she your firefly freckles, and when she laughs, they dance.
I want someday to scale a ditch, to cross by foot a dyke,
To measure your marches without claim, as tourist on a hike.
I’d visit a shed in County Wexford, once again disused,
Where the eddying echoes of mushrooms and men are buried under news:
Stacks of old papers, their troubled headlines dated mostly
From before my birth; what then? Can I recall the ghostly?
If at Mother Mary’s feet caltrops of candles flicker,
Yet outside cathedral doors will I hear whisper upon whisper
Ireland’s heroes I do not know, their names I can’t pronounce
But can I hear the hush that falls behind the rushing host?
We have been the stolen child, we have been the heifer lost
We have gloried Ireland fair, her sons and daughters cost.What is more than history? The death of a generation precedes
The death of those who remember it, and when they are gone
Only their poets can make us feel – a little, of what they have been.
Out of our labor to comprehend, the terrible beauty can be reborn
Meditations on a single word can graft some of what was torn
And if the native branch cleave to its weirdly chosen tree
Then perhaps Ireland yet will rise through unjust husbandry.
But we
We are American.
We have not been the stolen child, nor sought the heifer lost,
We have not gloried Ireland fair, at sons’ and daughters’ cost.
Ah, Ireland! Ireland!
I have not seen, nor wept nor bled for thee;
Still, O Ireland,
May your red hair always in my family be.

The Deadly History of Writing

Once upon a time we carved our words in stone
And broke the backs of slaves to erect
A few, monumental phrases.

For awhile we slaughtered sheep
Stole their skins and inked
Our thoughts on their hides.

Then we ground
Thousands of splinters to pulp
For mass fiction and the presses.

Now we power imaginary pages
By, so they say, burning remains
Of the prehistoric.

One day, I think
The worth of all of these words
Will be weighed.

An Epic Begins

Another work in progress, you might say... I started this a couple years ago and lost the piece of paper I had written it on (!) until recently. It will, one day, be a full-fledged epic poem written in Spenserian verse, and I'm putting up the first stanza so you can get a feel for what I'm working with. I have the content for the second stanza, a few random lines, and a general story in my head, and I'd like your input to help develop it.

Here is the general story: an old gardener lives in a cottage attached to a public garden (like a park) in a city and single-handedly maintains the premises; his "arch-enemy" is a beautiful rosebush, which alternately grows completely out of control or requires an intuitive babying to keep it alive, and the old gardener has just the right touch with it. He takes on a teenage assistant for several summers, a dreamer, and mentors the boy a little, mediates a little between the boy and his father, who wants a more serious-minded son, etc. Then, when the boy goes to college, he and the gardener grow out of touch and don't see one another for years. One night the old gardener is awaked to the sounds of a scuffle in his garden, and he finds the boy, now a young man, in trouble. He saves the boy but has seen "too much" (what was going on, I haven't decided... a date rape? a gangster deal? ...) and the boy kills him, unsuspecting, and buries the old gardener beneath the rose bush, which then proceeds to grow uncontrollably, encroaching on and taking over much of the rest of the garden.

That's all I know. Much of the symbolism, themes and such will, I think, evolve as I write it, but you now know about as much as I do. Here's the first stanza; leave me your thoughts.


The midsummer's morn was pale as chill
Death, and night warred mightily still 'gainst the redd'ning light
But of slumber the earth had drunk her fill -
Upon her carpet she scattered dew-diamonds bright,
Heralds she sent, with cheerful song and winged flight
And at the bottom of the hill, in the little cottage,
Woke the gardener, who, weak in knee and dim of sight
Still ruled and tended her, and from her recieved homage
Kingly; so he rose, and supped his morning pottage.