Wild Mind Wild Earth
“...the unsayable reality of contact...” -D. Hinton
Steel needle
pierces the weave
Blunt head. Big eye
Pulls strands of
turquoise, coal &
alabaster
What the heart carries
Then wrap & tie
encircling
A basket for
the ten thousand things
Thunk of snow
slips off the roof
Startling. Settling
into melt
The world skips a beat
like the deep silence
in a song. In a poem
DIRECTIONS
Two telephone poles
up Thunder Road
due south
Or
a zigzag break-trail weave
snowshoeing
across a glaze of
crystalline hoar crust
& thickets of unbent oak
Old leaves
like hovering avatars
the Way of the Mtn
山路
Claudia Putnam reads at the Tavern in Ouray
POETRY AT THE TAVERN ... This community literary series presented by the Wright Opera House hosted poet Claudia Putnam of the North Fork Valley Feb. 2nd in the ornate basement drinking establishment below Ouray’s historic opera landmark. Claudia read a number of moving poems from her award-winning first book, The Land of Stone and River (Moon City Press, Missouri State University, 2022), many of them set in the hills above Boulder where she once lived .... “It’s not often you see a crow this low in our canyon / He was willing to alight on a shoulder or arm. The heads of passing drivers would turn / Our neighbor gardened stooped over, the black crow pacing her back” – from “Black Bird” ... “Running the Highline, a fleeting thought of the threat of lions, turn my head to see the dogs chasing one, tail stretched out long, a comet through my heart / [A]ll those years running through woods, sensing but not seeing” –from “Flushed” ... “We women know the stir of sunlight on bare skin. Argent kiss of the stars sliding along arms / out there alone in the land of stone and river” -from “Starfuckers” ... Although she didn’t read this next piece at the Tavern, I was lucky to hear it in the Orvis pool where she practiced before the reading: “Crestone conglomerate emerges from several rock cycles sedimentary basins tilted into massifs recycled into new troughs, precipitated, cemented into more hard rock / unique as it does not break as other comglomerates do / have been sitting on the glacial outwash thumbing their noses at erosion / Mountains of the White Light they are said to have once been called” – from “As the Wind Comes Among Us” ... Her work takes us out into the natural world where she walks, alert, in awe and wonder. No stranger to tragedy, Claudia’s eye can be fierce, honest, curious, and unblinking as well as gracious. She holds us in her gaze, embraces this mysterious world in all itki’s human as well as more-than-human delight and random terror. A powerful reading.
DOUBLE NEGATIVE ... Split Lip Press of Nebraska awarded this extended essay of Claudia’s their creative non-fiction award last year, not because itki’s an easy read. Itki isn’t. A book about death never is. That’s a subject we, as rambunctious Americans, tend to avoid. And when we have to face a passing, our own, or with our loved ones, itki gets done quickly, quietly and then those remaining try to push that loss to the back of their all too busy lives once the mourning is over ... Double Negative turns that narrative on itki’s head. This is one long reflection on death, the tragedy, the sorrow, the contradictions, the ironies, the long coming-to-terms that is, if not acceptance, at least integration ... Losing a son, a first-born child, immediately after birth is a grief that never stops being present for Claudia. Nor for us. As we walk with her this difficult path of sadness, memory, dream and understanding. We get to know Jacob. His brief life all the more startling for itkis continuing impact on Claudia. And through her on us ... This is a powerful read. An antidote for the denial of dreams, the avoidance of death, revealing the essential impermanence of everything that appears stable and fixed. Double Negative is an opportunity to absorb, confront, resist, reflect and in the end deepen our connections to life and to death. Highly recommended.
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| Kate Kelley |
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| Carol Keeney |
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| Kelvin Kent |
It was cogent and well-done, and as Kent said, appears to be a wave of the future ... Uche Ogbuchi of Superior is reading Mar. 2nd. A great reader, winner of the Colorado Book Award, Uche is a wonderful poet. Come listen, and bring a poem.
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| Joanna Spindler at the Fig |
TALKING GOURD ... Finally, I wanted to connect Claudia’s Double Negative with the deep work that Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer has been doing in the wake of the death of her 16-year-old son, Finn. Losing a son, like Claudia, she too has chosen not to hide in the grotto of private grief but to illuminate for all of us what was powerful and enduring in sharing his life. To hold his death like a candle for all of us to see -- not only the light and shadows itki casts, but to celebrate as well as grieve. Like Claudia, she gives us a great gift.
Not Expecting
Tonight, I placed my hands on my belly
and recalled the first time I felt the flutter
of your body as it grew inside mine.
Oh, the thrill of that movement,
sweet proof of your being.
To be touched from the inside,
touched by life itself as it flourished
into trillions of cells. Oh,
to know life like that.
Even now, I can feel it,
the ghost of a kick,
can recall it as easily
as I recall sunshine on the skin.
After your death, is it strange
it feels like I carry you inside me again,
only this time I am the one
who is growing,
I am the one being formed.
-Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
SHAIMAA AL-SABBAGH
"I am the girl banned from love in the squares"
He's holding on for dear life
She's standing upright soon to be dead
Shotgunned in the back for standing
in peaceful protest
at Talaat Harb Square in Cairo
Armed with a wreath & banner
chanting
"Bread! Freedom! Social Justice!"
A poet activist for SPAP
the Socialist Peoples Alliance Party
Standing up for a better Egypt
& for her five-year-old Bebo
Standing in memory of the
Muslim Brotherhood martyrs of Tahir Square
slain unseating Mubarak
Shaimaa al-Sabbagh
Hair disheveled
Blood on her cheek
Shot down pointblank in the back
Dead that day
Standing up for us
Not wholly unlike what happened to Telluride’s award-winning local paper, the Watch, -- undercut by a Boulder conglomeratization that bought Clark Kent’s doppelganger, which in their hands, has devolved into an Investor News Organ of legals, centerfold real estate porn, desperate want ads for housing and unfilled job ads
My Norwood neighbor, hobbling on crutches from surgery and a fall, found herself unable to afford the steep Wrights Mesa rent increase (“to keep current with the Norwood market” she was told, but of course not for any improvement to the rural farmhouse itself) and had to move out by the first of the year. I helped. Hence this week’s poem.
MOVING OUT
A coming on of night after a turn
as Mormon Lee ferrying
my ten-year neighbor’s hoard
cruelly pushed out
her rental pupa in the chrysalis of winter
to new digs
Burrow. Concrete boots
Not really. Nicer place
kind of
The P-J an underground surround of
forest bathing
free from noisy Norwood’s dawn truckers
Ex-urban hot mics. Clinkers
raked from Telluride’s dangerous
rim
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| Hot Lips by Ed Werner |
Boardwalk
Cruising Santa Cruz
with McRedeye & Big Daddy Civ
Nowhere left us to migrate
here at the feet of the final roller coaster
of Manifest Destiny
Nickels & dimes hog-tied by machines
& carnie barkers roping us in
Big Daddy squeezes the trigger
on a row of die-cut ducks
Win a doll. Try your luck
Trained gunner
a veteran of foreign wars
he knocks ‘em all down
Fills his bag with trinkets & taffy
Every booth a bird cage
Every boom a bust
Spin the wheel. Lock & load
Damn the tomorrows
& full greed ahead
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| Battleship Slide Runs on Red Mountain (photo by Jerry Roberts) |
Avalanche
-for Rosemerry
Itki hits us hard in the face
Not just a slap
but a near-lethal blow
The full cold immense crush of grief
This entity we’ve never met
changing our names
to trauma
Halfback to my quarterback
in the suburb’s flag football league
Greg
was my buddy
not just my brother
Jokester
who’d make us giggle
hiding under the covers in his bed
telling funny stories
while parents moseyed around downstairs
watching Fifties game shows
Dead at fifteen
In & out of El Camino Hospital
Nine months in the passing
Told us one morning with a laugh
that he’d seen himself in a dream taking
“a long walk off a short pier”
The whole family in denial
Trusting in Bishop Sheen’s
rosary hour on the radio
& the anodyne fabulations
of our Roman hand-me-down
faith
And yet his passing young
made me question
everything
Only to find most answers suffocating
as concrete
Eventually
I swam my way out
free of the powder chutes
Avoiding chunky monkey rockfall
triumphant presidential krummholz
& all those beholden
to the Imperium’s hard rock markets
Digging out from under
the affluent overflow of a “free” world
addicted to capital
Time to open your eyes
Capt. Barefoot insists
Unpack compassion
Breathe in
the lyric valuables
cupped in your icy hands
Fill up on air ultimately
to float like a cloud
above Lone Cone’s beauty ways
Stand in the sunlight beside
love’s melting slabs of tragedy
Art Goodtimes
Union of Mountain Poets
Jack Mueller Brigade
13023
NOTA BENE:
“Ki” is a grammatical neologism Indigenous science writer Robin Wall Kimmerer advocates using in place of “it”, “its”, “it’s” or “itself” to help correct English’s objectification of the world. As a pre-school teacher I learned that we learn by going through the known to the unknown. So instead of substituting “ki”, I’ve chosen to add the Indigenous neologism to our neutral English pronoun as a suffix, changing the way we speak of things in English from inanimate to animate, “itki.” The neologist term is harvested from the last syllable of a longer word in Potawatomi for an “earth being.” That syllable, “ki”, is itkiself a Bodéwadmimwen suffix meaning “from the living earth.”
