Poems
Voice Card  -  Volume 11  -  Stuart Card Number 6  -  Wed, Dec 13, 1989 11:01 AM

Since I messed up the last time I tried to send poems through the usual methods, and since John is reshaping the usual Archipelago format as version 2.0 emerges, I'm just going to present some poems in voice card format. The following poem is a poem that I've written this summer and have included in the first section of THE BODY BESTIARY. The poem's full title is "The Voices I Hear Frog Hear: How, in the Season's First Snowfall, Frog Came to Leave His Pond in Quest of the Sea." The "I" in the title is of course Uncle Caterpillar. It goes something like this: (to get the full "look" of the poem, with its proper lineation, you'll have to expand the voice card screen):

	Voices like a wounded language -- like pins Of ice in trees they pricked into his skull As the pond's edge froze. . . ; that sunset, the bay's thin Necklace of tides shimmered, until snow fell; It whipped into him; it made our bones ache. . . ; And as I listened, each voice seemed as lost;
	". . .It begins --	". . .There is a sound	". . .The sea makes
	Like a scythe that cuts	That whispers	Her healing loosened
	From the swath	That empties	From a shell of sighs
	That is her flesh	Like waterfalls	Surrendering
	To remake us. . ."	It begins. . ."
	Frog heard the voices rise
	Like mists of breath on cold days surrounding Him, as tides fingered the marsh grass like a lyre. . . As he set out to make the sea his lover. . . That's it for now. I have the alphabet poems buried in a closet that has not yet been sorted since we moved, so unless I hear a great hue and cry of protest, I'll refrain from presenting those poems for awhile. Is that Philistine of me? Chaio.