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This poem was the first place winner for the Litchfield Review Poetry Prize a few years ago. You can also find it and others in Four Blue Eggs. Purchase your copy for a 20% discount during National Poetry Month–April

Annotating the Text

I tell my students to take up
their pens, savor the highlighter,
revel in the anticipation of appending
the words we make love to.
Most let their eyes follow the page
but not their untrained hearts, although
timidly, a few scribble whispers
on pages, becoming active, joining
in a dialogue with Bartleby.
One day they might revisit
these tactile memories, permanent
records of their comparative thought,
or maybe one of them
will remember this intimacy
upon finding, deep in the Tragedies,
her mother’s small handwriting
on a copy of Othello, urging Desdemona
to stay the course. One of these daughters
will find buried in the basement
dog-eared, spine broken, her name
underlined with a star next to it.

 

 

 

This poem (which you can find in Four Blue Eggs, available for 20% off in April) was inspired by a hike Eric and I did in Cape Cod a few years ago. We met painter Laura Gajeweski who was working at one of the dune shacks.

“A Great Deal of Company”

~from Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

After the storm, the loneliness
does not evaporate. A half-day trek
to the shingled cottage through dunes
ripe with coyote tracks and unfriendly
dwarf pines means another week in isolation
with only the oily pigment of August
and the acrid stink of turpentine
to argue with. Even when the sun
in its naked, unforgiving callousness
ventures out again, holes in the atmosphere
remain. It could be worse.

A fourth trapped mouse rumors
to be still alive behind the shack,
and the ghosts of bums and poets ricochet
around the creaky loft. These, anyway, are voices,
consolation for the blank canvas in front of her.
A still life of bowled fruit decays in the charcoal
of her mind. First the brush must dip itself
into the clear water where the muses bathe,
but the well coughs up only the red iron of earth.

Once the mottled conglomerates
of sunset arrive, dinner is made; the wood stove
sparks against a damp log, the unswept floor
calls for a broom, and the burden of idleness
finally exhausts her. She dunks dry bristles
into wet, sandy paint, spreads black onto white
and forges a scene: stick figures walking
in the terrestrial moonscape of dune summer.
Then, a blue crescent of water loops off
the feathered page, blurs past beach grass
to the deep, ample surf, its shores crowded
with the blinking eyes of sea gazers, each
with gravity ’s sadness salted to one brush tip.

 

This wasn’t the shack Laura was staying in. Hers was a little bigger.

Here’s a sample poem from Four Blue Eggs. The poem also appeared in The Wayfarer.

West Woods Cemetery

Sharing the ground with the low stones

of an old wall,  a thickly scarred maple,

perhaps not even a sapling when names

 

were etched in granite, spreads its limbs

to shade a patch of  club moss. In a hollow

high on the trunk, a family of raccoons

 

wakes in the midday sun. Tiny, patched heads

peek with sleepy eyes from the tear-shaped

opening; a cautious mother tries to shield

 

her suckling kits from those who might

steal them. A striped tail slipping through

the crease of wood or an outstretched  leg

 

is reprimanded back into protection

of the den. Too small to venture down the tree,

the babies have not yet tested the dexterity

 

of their hands, never pressed  an acorn

or frog between them, nor tunneled beneath

the fixed stakes of a fence. Chattering

 

like birds, they don’t sense the luck of birth,

sequestered above grassy hummocks

half-empty with nearly forgotten tombs.

 

Soon they will learn the secrets of the mask,

how to face a moonless night and scavenge

the dull nocturne of suburbia. However crafty

 

and industrious the newborns become,

it will be hard to pass up the easy traverse

across a paved road, and scurry fast enough

 

to miss the black tumult of oncoming tires;

flies will swarm in silent thunder around

gnarled grey fur stuck in unburied rigor,

outstretched paws clawing at a thin gray sky.

See the link here (and don’t forget to order your copy)

The poems in Four Blue Eggs reflect a wide span of time, poetically and literally. The earliest poem was “born” when I was an undergraduate; the most recent, a few months before I sorted through my files looking for poems that would fit together as a collection. Like me, the poems seem to be fascinated by time. Many poems mark milestones—birth, adolescence, schooling, growing older, dying. Some muse on time standing still, some trace the sun passing over the sky on a single day, some lament that it soon will run out. I find the passage of time—cosmic time, rock time—extraordinarily interesting. Humans are consumed by time in a different way, so I enjoy watching how trees and animals approach the world, seemingly unaffected except to acknowledge, now it is winter, now it is summer.

The philosophy of Homebound Publications aligns with what I try to do in my poems: contemplate, observe, and reflect. Tinker, tinker, tinker, write a little, tinker some more. Occasionally a poem comes about exactly as it happened, (like “These Hours”) but most of the time, poems ferment for a long time (like “Delta 88”). For me, that’s a good thing; like a sprout in a countertop window, a fair amount of time, sun, and moonshine is needed before a poem makes its way into the world. I let the poem tell me where it wants to go. Often, it’s nowhere near where I expected. “The Mail Drop” needed a story, so I gave it one. “The Nautical Why” needed Adrienne Rich, so I found her.

When I look at the collection as a whole, I see life taking shape, born out of a petri dish, if you will, like the girl in the opening poem. A lot of things happen along the way. There is some philosophizing (“The World of Ideas”, some learning (“Community College”), some confusion (“Mechanics”), some love “Caesura”), some sadness (“Threads”). Sometimes seasons change, sometimes disasters ensue, sometimes you make it up the mountain, sometimes you don’t. Creatures are born and loved ones die. But the poems bring them back and help let them go. Time passes. After it all, if you are able to “carry yourself out of a burning building” then that is a remarkable thing for me as the writer.

Take a look at the first few pages of Four Blue Eggs then order your copy! I can’t wait to see the real thing–my copies are shipping right now.

 

Finalist in the 2013 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize

About the Book: Four Blue Eggs is sense music, an exploration of beginnings and of endings. In this collection of poems, Amy Nawrocki intuits fireflies and sapphires, observes gardens rooted in glasses of water, and tests the bindings of old books. Solace abounds—in winter’s white, in the hefty doors of an Oldsmobile, in half melted candles. Stick figures walk in this terrestrial moonscape, birds nest in improbable trees, daughters survive without mothers and fathers. Her poems propose that though “we earn the favor of being by breaking,” the pieces are salvageable; bruises heal from the inside through the universe’s infinite surrogacy. The collection contemplates how to tether the salty wounds of sadness, how to find our treeness, and how to say good bye.

PRE-ORDER TODAY for shipping on Jan. 15th, two weeks before the release date of Feb. 7.