For the Attenuated Praise, my dear one. Let us disappear into praising. Nothing belongs to us. —Rilke, from “Elegy for Marina” I seem attenuated, my friend the physicist tells me. I think I know what he means. I am stretched thin by grief, the taut wire of my life grown weak. I wear it on my face, show it in my crawl through the day, nights populated with dreams of the missing. He says it as though he fears me. But I am not a graven image, a token of anguish to be looked on. We are all living in extremis, attached, tensile, to this wire. Swifts caught in the air above the tipu trees, starlings wound around a belfry as on a guide rope. We are all in thrall to the earth—a line of seagulls, lit by the sunset, forming a ladder to the sea. We are held together by what has sliced us open. The tide comes to shore and rushes back out to meet itself. Here is your grief, on my face. My gaping heart knowing yours. —From So...
My new chapbook, Song of the Overcast , is a collection of poems dealing with grief, loss, love. Rooted in the natural world. Poems in simple language but with deep feeling. It is available for presale starting October 18, 2021, and will be released in February 2022. Order here: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/song-of-the-overcast-by-beverly-voigt/
That Autumn in Pennsylvania Little has given me so much joy as to walk quietly into that field of horses early each Saturday, the smell of earth and animal sweet and musky, to look for the reddish freckled one called Strawberry. To approach her as I would a loved one sleeping. I’d let her notice me, run my hand along the length of her neck, speak low and sing-song of the morning’s innocence. Of her warmth. I could be tethered to this earth forever, forgetting what our bodies lose every moment to the open air. Our exhalations rising in clouds, disappearing into the fields of the sky. Here is the scent and warmth of uneven ground. And breath enough for large and small breathing bodies. Taking her reins I start walking. Her ponderous hooves lift and follow. When her head swings down for a scratch across my wool sweater, I feel...
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