Brenda Hillman: California Poets Part 4, Four Poems
Brenda Hillman
December 29th, 2021
California Poets: Part IV
Brenda Hillman
Four Poems
++– The Formation of Soils –+–
For forty million years a warm, warm rain —
then the sea got up to try to relax.
Vulnerable volcanoes had just melted away.
He worked below, translating the author’s imps and downs,
his ups and demons—;
pines grew skyward though the pines were not.
Thus began long episodes of quiet,
nickel laterites not ready
for the slots.
It took periods of soft showers attacking the dream
under the silt-covered sun,
Osiris washing his fragments,
Leda swimming with her vagabonds.
Everyone is made essentially the same way.
Through notebooks of tight red dirt
Franciscans walked upside down under us:
aluminum oxides, incidents of magma,
and I had to go down in the earth for something—
Iron sediments spread over the foothills where Caliban
had his flat;
I was wearing the brown sweater when we spoke,
my heart and the one below translating his heart out.
But by that time, what.
Experience had been sent up, at an angle.
+–+ ––+
from Cascadia, Wesleyan University Press, 2001
Species Prepare to Exist After Money
Turns out bacteria communicate in color.
They warn each other in teal
or celadon & humans assign
meaning to this, saying they are distressed
or full of longing. The wood rat
makes a nest of H’s; it hoards
the seven tiny silences. Crows in the pine
can count specific faces like writers
who feel their art has been ignored.
My father spent his life thinking
about money though he knew
it causes most of this stupid violence,
& he thought of me as a sensible person;
you have the chemical for sensible, he said.
There was no tragedy between us,
unlike how poor Joyce wrote
that his daughter turned away
from that battered cabman’s face, the world.
i didn’t turn away because i don’t know
where it is, it is all over, & when it seems
pure nothingness has come to pass,
i know another animal prepares itself
nationless, not sensible;
thinking of it helps a little bit—
From Extra Hidden Life, among the Days
(Wesleyan University Press 2018)
Dawn Tercets, with Blake & Nuthatch
& a new thought waited in its
triangle —refusal, hope & dream— then, as you slept—light
between the commas of dawn birds (not even sure
if the bird you hadn’t seen— white-breasted nuthatch,,
could find its commas, in the tree) then:
the knowledge of the them you feared failing, not the test from some
thug inner government — or someone else’s conscience—
but yourself, at your most secret public,
since language is a living thing, vital, vast —…
The naturalist had
taken a knife from the group
to slice open
an insect gall at the edge of the leaf… it looked like a pouty
red lip or a valentine. He wanted to see the larva
inside, was slicing
to show, well, maybe
the opposite of Blake. Rose, thou art
not exactly sick, thou art merely inhabited…
The instrument of change would chew itself out,
eventually. But you were human.
You wanted to be desired. Thought of.
Reprinted from The Jung Journal- forthcoming
In a Few Minutes Before Later – Wesleyan University Press 2022
distal
Punctuation at the end of time
You will love each other
till the end of time (totally
a cliché but)... seems
like time might have more
than one end: : knoblike
structures on butterfly feelers,
(butterflies have them,
moths don’t...
Rhopalocera, clubbed horn, sort of
micro-clocks telling monarchs
when to migrate & so on, twin
apostrophes like ’’ or ‘ ’,
one on the distal side toward eternity,
one toward human life);; sometimes
the end of time is in the middle
as Lyn’s essay against
closure indicates. Also noted is how
finality in some poems is scattered
to make nano-seconds as when
light strikes one of two nothings on
biramous branches of the righteous oak....
if you loved a person well
it lasted till the end of time,,
after which, it continued—
forthcoming
In a Few Minutes Before Later – Wesleyan University Press 2022
Author Bio:
Brenda Hillman is the author of ten collections of poetry, from Wesleyan University Press, most recently Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days (2018). In a Few Minutes Before Later is forthcoming in 2022. Named by Poets and Writers as one of fifty inspiring writers in the world, Hillman has worked as a writer, teacher, editor and activist. Her work has received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for innovation in poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. With her mother, Helen Hillman, she co-translated Brazilian poet Ana Cristina Cesar’s At Your Feet. Hillman has served as a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets; she is a mother and grandmother, and lives with her husband Robert Hass in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary’s College of California.
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