River Brink - a cento

The stream is brimful in the grassy fringe

stone bridge among the withes

        old as the elms that shelter it.

A thunder of horses stretches up the slope       

moist necks 

        freed from the harness.

Source text:

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Between Being and Becoming

  

Desire marks each of us so differently

no matter how long, how fiercely we love.

Between being and becoming, we fail

so often and in such ordinary ways.

See how the sliding days silt in,

taking our other hundred lives with the water -

each one waiting, having borne us this far,

becoming finned and whole, swimming off.

Silence completes us, simple as those few notes

that answer the dark on a summer night and fall still.

Source text for Cento: selected last lines from Jane Hirshfield's Of Gravity & Angels

Scribble the Holy Contour

Scribble everything!

Get drunk with your life, its own visionary tics, the true

story of the world interior – jewel center

of recollection. 

Swim in language,

in the holy contour of life

emblazoned in praise

of wild, undisciplined time.

Bits and pieces culled from Jack Kerouac's 30 Writing Tips

Raw, Wild Summer

Prey to luminous mornings

  in whose golden pulp

        lay the core of long afternoons

raw      wild      summer

  

  drenched with honey

Cento Source text: The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz (pages 25 & 26)

Erasure of Neruda's Epithalamium

At first I did not see you: I did not know

  your           presence:

  

the shouts of the wind in the shadow.

Do you remember

how sleep grew

in you,

      how  

               the wind

  

echoed  

      its secret syllable

  

and all things spoke 

of the seed that half opens?

Your name is on the petals

of the rose that grows on the stone,

       a scarlet mouth  

deciphers your name:

  

    broken window

crazy with light.  

Bonewhite light - A Plath Cento

Something else hauls me through air——


Listen: these are its hooves:


A bonewhite light

behind all things.

The low smokes roll from me like Isadora’s scarves.


A life baptized in no-life for a while,


the spirit

escapes like steam.



Tonight it has receded like a ship's light.


I can't get it out of my mind.





*





This is a cento constructed with lines from Sylvia Plath's poems from Ariel: Ariel, Elm, Fever 103, and poems from Crossing the Water: Insomniac, Last Words, The Surgeon at 2 a.m., Zoo keeper's Wife

The Crescent of Silence is Brimmed - a Neruda collage

When I open the door of night,

the crescent of silence is brimmed.

It is midnight: all around me

death beats on a gong, black water

the screaming of birds in the rain.

Something shoves me toward damp houses, into dark

corners, into hospitals with bones flying out of the windows,

devoured by haze. All things that live

give some part of themselves to the air.

The big breathing encircles me

with its raddle of towering blossoms, mouths

with their teeth black at the root:

a kiss dusky with pitch.

 
 
Phrases and lines from Five Decades: Poems 1925-1970 Pablo Neruda, translated by Ben Belitt
Painting: The Water-Sprite and Ägir's Daughters by Nils Johan Olsson Blommér