Once, Out of Night, Unbidden
She has a cycle of poems under the rubric "Home: A Calendar" in which "March thaw, March snow" features a descriptions of crocuses.
their white tongues pokingI recall that another species of crocus (Colchicum autumnale) blooms in the fall and although its presence is not evident in "October" which ends the home/calendar sequence — the poem, indeed the book, is spacious enough to admit the reader's wandering — and the March image of the crocuses as napkins held, once, to the lips is part of the whole catalogue of "these moments of luminous grace" holding beauty and grief and set as a sign "here" indicating "this is the way to come home". These moments call out beyond the immediate sequence to the preceding sequence in honour of Bronwen Wallace who died of cancer of the mouth. That sequence is called "The Sound of the Birds". There the last poem of the sequence ends with the line "the dark heart of a night without song". That is the beginning point of the calendar, the round of time, that is a route to a final resting. This is the way of Carolyn Smart in The Way to Come Home. Or to read softly, it once was, because home may become a night without song and initiate another journey.
unbidden from the loam:
pale children, tentative and lean,
summer's hope a linen napkin
held to the lips, once, softly
And so for day 1331
05.08.2010
