Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Books (so happily) received:
Ivy Alvarez's Mortal (Red Morning Press, 2006), from which I offer the following gorgeous work (Demeter poems are a favorite of mine, as reader and as writer) :
Demeter sleeps
Demeter sleeps and waits in the dank earth as root tendrils tighten knots in her hair. Millipedes curl and nestle in her ears; still her eyes oscillate behind her lids. Something secret ticks on, unstoppable: a bulb that waits to bud from cold, flowers in spring. It is a thin song she waits on, a hum Persephone might make below her breath as she gathers the corn to her. She knows that summer hides in winter's face. A worm butts its head inside her palm's cup, dislodges a wheat seed, which germinates, its thin self rising through layers and months, so that a stalk cracks the soil, turns green, lives.
(6)
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