Monday, November 23, 2020

Jaclyn Piudik :

 folio : Paul Celan/100

 

 

Afterwar/d

                       
The finger fingers worry
beading presentiment of the coming cold

something April      months away


then/    you do not wait

         
to decompose         smolder
          in a lick of chilblains
 

independent chronologies grieving
one another       needles amok

a log refits itself     into a pine                                  
forest      a field of sunflowers
in the Ukraine

an abandoned pear grove                               

the earth smiles rueful
in her bodice of fatigue

perfect flatness  after the heave
diamonds previous or invisible 

grave clues

 

 

 

 

 

Fragments not conducive to a zen garden

 

Spilling breath to conjure a burrow
                                          an enclave redly, a thought cataleptic

 

She thought the strange tattoo on her neighbor’s arm
                              was cool:      a lover’s phone number      the repopulation of a memory

 

 

They shot the baby boy still in her arms          made her throw him in and left her
to wander back to the forest

 

[a whine ambidextrous 

 

She sips breast milk from a styrofoam cup
snaps to awaken the postcard, astounds with lung scratch to stifle the fluke



 

The goldenrods bloom yearly
                                 
lacking habit, sessile                     unaccustomed to a craving for extinction

 

 

Everyone has the capacity for color    
                                                              everyone                 has the capacity for color

 

 

 

 

in all her habits of sadness    

 

draped red in    identities unknown, unbidden
stars fall through fingers      spitting sparks    
m
asquerade as light   ribbons   threads   as if 

       

             in a process of creation 

  

 

a six-degree day to hypothesize    rivers
untangle interstitial silences         & the sun

  

           still 93 million miles away

 

 

headlines and deadlines      circumspection
whimsies of doors ajar       beauty turns on itself

  

          writing the dusk      into a frenzy       

 

 

nary a cyclamen in sight    nary a stitch of importance
in its nether      far, it is             far   

  

 

            farther here than in the next field

 

 

prudence knows surety   as the hour of bathing       
a quaint miasma              immoveable passages           

looming in the seams   between      dream vistas                    

  

                  unleavened answers

 

 

and the waters remember      pushed by a gracious wind: 
      
out of holding  an ingot    to parse

  

The Trees that Grow There May Not

 

I myself have

taken breaks

from blooming

later unsoiled 

eventually broken

down by accident 

or arson

 


  

 

Jaclyn Piudik (Toronto) is the author of To Suture What Frays (Kelsay Books 2017) and three chapbooks, most recently, the corpus undone in the blizzard (Espresso 2019). Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including New American Writing and Columbia Poetry Review. Celan’s work being a longstanding subject of fascination and study, she has translated some of his original German poems and is currently translating his French poems into English.

 

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