Wordy Girls

quantity of heat a slender body

ovens up around itself, when need be.

Now her slow, purring, sometimes snorish,

perfectly intelligible sleeping sounds

abruptly stop. A leg darts back

and hooks my ankle with its foot

and draws me closer still. Soon

her sleeping sounds resume, telling me,

"Come, press against me, yes, like that,

put your right elbow on my hip bone, perfect,

and your right hand at my breasts, yes, that's it,

now your left arm, which has become extra,

stow it somewhere out of the way, good."

Entangled with each other so, unsleeping one,

together we will outsleep the night.

 ---Galway Kinnell 

Galway met Josephine three years ago in England and was impressed by her poems. He brought her work to his American publisher, Houghton Mifflin, and the result is Silence Fell, a book of poems that covers the sheepherding year and also tells the tale of her marriage and life on a sheep farm. Here's one poem she read, inspired by people's curiosity with her marriage to her much older husband.


 

Do I Sleep With You? 

Do I sleep with you or you with me?
It's splitting hairs to say I came to you
and use your brush and comb, and therefore we
don't "sleep together." But it may be true.
In any case, I say you sleep with me.
The action's mostly yours. You made me stay.
Made staying perfect, future and to be.
Apart from that, it's what most people say.
Tributaries join rivers, but they mix,
go to somewhere, neither cares to where.
Both stand and swell their bank beside a tree.
They're not concerned with any verbal tricks.
So, say I joined your river, if you dare.
In any case, I say you sleep with me.

---Josephine Dickinson

A few gems from the evening:

Galway Kinnell:

When I write a new poem, poetry is the last thing that is on my mind.

If I can put it away for a long time, and then when I take it out and read it, I'm still surprised...that's when I'm pretty sure I've written a poem.

A poem must move from the chaos of the real world to focus in.

All my joys are a little tempered because I don't know what's just around the corner.


Josephine Dickinson:

I keep notebooks and sometimes look back and find poems already written in there.

Each poem is a small journey that is part of the larger journey that is my life.  I write to try to find out what is essential.  I would say my life had been full of inessential things.  A poem is my journey from the inessential to the essential.


So, last night's event renewed my desire to go hear live poetry more often.  I'm lucky enough to live in a place that has poetry readings/events more frequently than most places, and I need to take advantage of that!