ASPASIOLOGY
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact

Maxine Chernoff in Response to Donna de la Perrière

flight: plank of stone, / orphan sundered from narrative's / how and why.

To Live on Air 
​

Wholeness reckoned
as a stream,
beauty tossed
as scarves
at a bazaar,
the meal never served
as want becomes         
the cellos
in the piece, music
emanating
from two griefs.
Sighted and recited,
words repeat
their vow to live
on air, ashen as leaves
under a stone
or faces in a photo
speaking as if meshed
In half-lit prayers.
As night prepares
its jewels, the play
begins when
Prospero works
his charms by which
a world appears.
lucid as the song of dust
played upon a page of notes.
 

​

Ballad
​

“An ethereal wind chorus opens the second scene.”—Stanley Sadie

The white of wings, stranger

​To this air, recumbent, in October,

without fog or robes of silk

To twist across the sky. An hour

can be melody or bird

as we place our kindest

selves into the world,

which wears our sorrow

as a lover the scent

of her beloved. How

we wrest distance

from its map,

the funereal mums ordinary

as containment, the eucalyptus

tattered as a guest in from a storm.

Place me in the earth,

and I will breathe

for years. Lock the doors

to the actual and let the world

mime its slow retreat

​into dusky grapes and glistening bell
 
 

Did I Tell You?
​

"The Kansas City Stomp was not written in Kansas City ."-- Jelly Roll Morton
 
 
How you were
 
made of words,
 
on a lazy Sunday
 
when letters hovered
 
like birds against
 
winter's white
 
sky, how on
 
the borders
 
of the page
 
the indifferent field
 
Was absent of
 
decorative stone
 
or stream, how
 
you were
 
an expenditure
 
of voice
 
and stranger still,
 
said nothing.
 
Born of love
 
and its omissions,
 
time and its
 
corrections,
 
memory's trap-door,
 
the song is
 
a limit,
 
the smallest
 
bridge to
 
the next hesitation.
 
 

Fossil
​

Soul and signature
conceived of egg and feather.
Nothing liquid or envious of
flight: plank of stone,
orphan sundered from narrative's
how and why. Where you stand,
no solidity for lamp light or
summer's late full moon.
You register the hardness of stone,
the solid geometry of words,
fleeting, without allegory
 to hold desire, you form a circle
of your want, enclosing space.
 


Maxine Chernoff is Chair of Creative Writing at SFSU. Winner of a 2013 NEA Fellowship in Poetry and the 2009 PEN USA Translation Award, she is the author of 6 works of fiction and 14 books of poems, most recently "Here." ​

Follow on Twitter or email Gertrude And:


Email

aspasiology@gmail.com
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact