Euthermia

Marilyn Dumont. green girl dreams mountains

There are two poems that are juxtaposed in memory after reading. The first is entitled "kindling" and amounts to a detailed description of the speaker's mother's handwriting and concludes that the writing was left as

broken twigs on the page
as kindling
for me

It echoes later in the sequence of poems with the ending of "I am five" which ending arrives after a run through of a dry weather landscape (grasses that move like flames, grasshoppers "snapping their hot wings" and "adolescent pines wrestle the wind"). This is an evocation that seems full of an innocent indulgence of a five-year old in the sheer physicality of the vegetation and insect life but the ending almost upends the sentiment:

but I am five and
don't know that this burning inside is
loneliness

And you go back to the beginning of the poem to see that this loneliness is inscribed in beauty much as the broken twigs too were in their setting. I Wandered as Lonely as a Cloud with its contemplative recollection in the mind's eye of the thousand daffodils provides a Wordsworthian touchstone for the "burning inside" — good old animal body heat, sign of life.

And so for day 1368
11.09.2010