Green is the Orator
Read Green is the Orator Online
Authors: Sarah Gridley
Green is the Orator
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the College of Arts and Sciences at Case Western Reserve University.
SARAH GRIDLEY
Â
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University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2010 by The Regents of the University of California
For acknowledgments of previous publication, please see page 89.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gridley, Sarah, 1968â.
Green is the orator / Sarah Gridley.
     p.   cm. â (New California poetry ; 29)
ISBN
978-0-520-26241-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN
978-0-520-26242-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. NatureâPoetry. I. Title.
PS
3607.R525G74 2010
811'.6âdc22Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 2009037667
Manufactured in the United States of America
19Â Â Â 18Â Â Â 17Â Â Â 16Â Â Â 15Â Â Â 14Â Â Â 13Â Â Â 12Â Â Â 11Â Â Â 10
10Â Â Â 9Â Â Â 8Â Â Â 7Â Â Â 6Â Â Â 5Â Â Â 4Â Â Â 3Â Â Â 2Â Â Â 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
ANSI
/
NISO Z
39.48â1992 (
R
1997) (
Permanence of Paper
).
For life- and love-giving mothers, in the biologic and cosmic realizations of the word. For Beecher, Elizabeth, Julie, Kitsey, Laure, Linda, Martha, Patricia, and Mom.
Salt Marsh, Thick with Behaviors
Table of Consanguinity (The Cousin Chart)
Is He Decently Put Back Together?
Coming to the Festival of the God of Boundaries
Return of the Native to the Widespread Hour
A General Discrimination of Synonyms
First Inspirations of the Nitrous Oxide, Pneumatic Institute, 1799
Second Inspirations of the Nitrous Oxide
Film in Place of a Legal Document
Against the Throne and Monarchy of God
The Orator's Maximal Likelihood
The Beauty of Where We Have Been Living
He is hell become heaven, becoming hell; he is evolution, a matter of energy, a star in the dark tomb, a shadow cast by sunlight. He is life that cannot be contained, a holy insurrection, blessed negativity.
About the star-cold abundance of August sandâ
this spell of my two hands working in the dark
I liken to the feeling of your two hands working
behind me, or your two hands coming before me
in the white mirth of bright drapes, white lengths
the wind sends in salt-light through the feeling
your two hands have in coming to find me.
There are things I liken to crossbeams
inside of things I call politeness, things I liken to super-
intendence, seashells, pale hosts of erosions, fadings
I liken to insight. There in the window
of your soloist house, I think that nothing
is holding up
this thought that is feeling you moving.
In seasoned assertion, the red-winged calling of the grass.
From spaces outside the territory, the stone summons,
the stone sum. Weight is a quality known to boundary's
swerve. The sum of which is fragile: waves leave mica
stuck to skin. Some I know of inherence. Some
I have not remembered. Among the lightest of insects,
a Comma has a cryptic edge.
A woman should behave herself
,
naturally
. In mica, the glamorous stammer of mirrorâ
A woman should behave herself naturally
. Bill-tilt,
check-call, songspreadâa bone flute snapped
from passage of birdâthe unearthed
played unearthly.
Once they are there,
the bearings are theirs, the sickness peculiar to motion
removed by horizon's evident flatness.
What they bear is the date, and whatever will follow.
Bay of gray margins, mobile as curfew. Rollick of tides
and empty casements. Stone-deaf stones marking thoughts
out loud. Schist like a book of tempers.
Stars in dogged pantomime.
Exactly what
the waves were for lengthening.
Slow, elemental line. Gray like the saint of a put-out fire.
Sea of gray margins, solemn as seals. On it a flash
like something wrong. On it the falling quiet.
What they touch is the moss
like an earthly expense.
Green in a poise
almost vernacular, almost the sensible
guide to North.
My somnolence is
the rest of trees (sessile touch around dry leaf
to know my weirdest passiveness). To go the irises
the pebbled drive the luminous
claps into valley.
When you have posted a letter in the open air,
an artist will know your feeling,
will ground the clouds in canines of noon,
gold leaf pressured over graphite sun.
To feel outside an envelopeâ
unchangeable corner mailbox blueâ
there are words in the morning against
the mind, containing sleep
in the shape of walking. A nomenclature castle opens to sky:
grassy crenellations
I may not taste
or touch.
Chagrin the name between the banks,
so many doors down and winded from counting,
pronouns in acts of substitution,
weirdness in the middle of making promises,
where I am in mind for nothing else
than to call out,
to wander ahead with namesâ
to emerge as the last of the wood-
wind family.
To call out,
to utter in
an undertoneâ
the continents
in nameable forms, the squid
that tastes where it touches.
Or simply,
drunk
âDutch courage in the face of milk and flummeryâ
our passive margin, our transitional crust, our rift obtusely
known as creation.
As it lost its concentration, gold was a million things
that
wouldn't
be dragged from ocean:
crass undertaking
a reason to formâ               the sun profounding surfaceâ
the come-loose asterisks
of starfish bones.
You paint precipitation
following thunder: wands of soaked fire, arcs of sea-
revising sun, salt come up to seed in clouds, downfallen cool
and diagonal water.
You paint the garden the garden is: a border blued in
in heavy heads, hydrangeas fed aluminum sulfate,
a border blued up in amended beds, in old
pear peelings and grass.
Moon is to the blueness of panicles as seawater is
to the whiteness of rain. Hours in this feeling
of yours and mine.
Born in the woulds of the given body, waking up
this often there.
Viburnum's winter fairy globe: in outer robing
it is vivid: a cardinal meal in the drifting bright.
As inner movement understood, radiant caverns
in the out of sight. Up for the habit
of the robust world, the wood boat floating
of a starred green loom.
Wherever unsteady
meets with unsteady, there is the lot of physical forms. And guest
and guessed are one to me: whether the sky or whether the lake.
I feel before I want to know: water stays fluid below the frost,
and silver quiets the jargoned heart.
Long in the wild of new-ending winter, the exhumed fletcher