Writers, Artists, and Poets of Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Poetry

1.

A hawk circles the wild fig,
violets bloom in the shade.

It is a day no brighter than others.
Still, words bring their own light
and we turn our faces blindly toward them.

2.

Trying to read Sappho's honeycombed and eroded texts
is like listening to my mother tell of her life during the war--

everything left out is what we need to know.

Is it "meteor" or "meter,"
"respect" or "respite?"

Are we riding over or under the wave?

3.

Scatter and fled, covered with road dust, lost in transit
ploughed by the shear forces of wind and exile

decipher this erased surface, the scarred geologic
strata of memory

stories without a beginning, middle or end

--unknown face half devoured by shadow
--patterns of a carpet or carved armoire
--forgetting the word for mulberry: szeder
--fruit that stains your hands black
--the scent of wool after rain
--fresh milk
--across the horizon flashes of something like lightening

let the night fall in on itself

4.

All I could learn about the war and her exile
came from the pressure of frozen foods shaping silence,

the acute, negative space outlined by TV dinners with their
aluminum compartments and satellite patterend melmac

dinnerware leaning into the unspoken

5.

Cartography of exile

where we pursue   not the deer, but the trail
of her absence   [which tells us more]   tracking

not the object of desire, but the entire field--

fierce and unmarked wilderness that sustains her