A burn deeper than a bonfire

On the afterlife of trees

First the note:

'La Quercia del Tasso' or 'Tasso's Oak' on Janiculum (Gianicolo) hill, Rome, is said to have been a place of rest and contemplation for Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso in the weeks before his death at the nearby Monastery of Sant'Onofrio. The tree is propped up by iron supports, having been struck by lightening in 1811.

Now the conclusion to the poem.

the burning starts. The time will come
when I will need to breathe for you, when we two
will crackle, our cinders' unobserved
parabolas like brief, celestial monsters, or space-
                         junk some call shooting stars.

Jaya Sevige. Surfaces of Air. "La Quercia del Tasso"

It is the tree speaking.

And so for day 2127
09.10.2012

Liminal Ball Tossing

Oana Avasilichioaei
Limbinal

As suiting a book about margins and perimeters, the book begins with a poem called "Bound" which itself begins with an apostrophe to "Border" which I misread as beginning "Border, you tenderly."

Border, you terrify. Border, you must dictate your own dismantling or we will perish. Purge. Border, are you listening? Are you empire?

Just why I remember the opening line as tender is perhaps attributable to the erotic charge of some of the stanzas and perhaps also related to the figure of the child in conjunction with the sonorities and semantics of sound's traveling: "We wanted to theorize the voice, give it credence in the angle of an article." [Here I detect traces of Nicole Brossard in the wish to theorize and of Gertrude Stein in the emphasis on the little word or article — it may just be me and the borders I have visited.]

"And the child grasps the wall of sound can and will become language."

And so for day 1968
03.05.2012

Held Hold A Hearing

Lisa Gordon offers poems constructed out of a series of couplets almost like ghazals in Moving in with the Dalai Lama. Often they, the couplets, float off and dissipate with the onrush of the next set. This one is an exception from the title poem.

The oak sawed away at this morning never held a tree house.
I could love a leaf.

I regularly misremember the line about the tree house. I invariably have the oak personified and never "hearing about a tree house".

And so for day 1330
04.08.2010