FRUIT & FLOWERS HUNG THICK FALLING

in
KATIE PETERSON

Never a gardener, she
became interested

in gardening. The dying
are known to

make estranging
decisions

about the disclosure
of information.

Everyone knew
where the report

cards were, but the marriage
license proved difficult

to locate. Tomato
and potato vines crawled

up different stakes
in the same barrel,

and she tended
equally the decorative

plants, the lobelia and alyssum
fringing and clinging to

the edges, in the sun
under a visor

fuzzy with the terry
cloth of enough

vacations to forget
the number, to wear

the lettering 
into half-glyphs insinuating

but not stating
the location of past

happiness. She knelt,
hinged

at the waist,
thrust

her hands in dirt
feeling for roots

even when 
they no longer

needed
tending, even

when fruit and flowers
hung thick falling.

AT THE FISHHOUSES

in
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,icily free above the stones,above the stones and then the world.If you should dip your hand in,your wrist would ache immediately,your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burnas if the water were a transmutation of firethat feeds on stones and burns with a dark grey flame.If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,then briny, then surely burn your tongue.It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,drawn from the cold hard mouthof the world, derived from the rocky breastsforever, flowing and drawn, and sinceour knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
-  Extract from "At the Fishhouses" from The Complete Poems 1927-1979, by Elizabeth Bishop.

THE DANCE

in
A middle-aged woman, quite plain, to be polite about it, and
somewhat stout, to be more courteous still,
but when she and the rather good-looking, much younger man
she's with get up to dance,
her forearm descends with such delicate lightness, such restrained
but confident ardor athwart his shoulder,
drawing him to her with such a firm, compelling warmth, and
moving him with effortless grace
into the union she's instantly established with the not at all
rhythmically solid music in this second-rate cafe, 

that something in the rest of us, some doubt about ourselves, some 
sad conjecture, seems to be allayed,
nothing that we'd ever thought of as a real lack, nothing not to be
admired or be repentant for,
but something to which we've never adequately given credence,
which might have consoling implications about how we 
misbelieve ourselves, and so the world,
that world beyond us which so often disappoints, but which
sometimes shows us, lovely, what we are.


- C.K. Williams 

MAN CARRYING THING

 
 The poem must resist intelligence
Almost successfully. Illustration:

A brune figure in winter evening resists
Identity. The thing he carries resists

The most neccessitous sense. Accept them, then,
As secondary (parts not quite percieved

Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles
Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt

Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow
Out of a storm we must endure all night,

Out of a storm of all secondary things),
A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until
The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

- Wallace Stevens


The sonnett and the last two lines which ring true and achingly clear: sometimes you can't deny the power of structure to carry forth meaning (be it in poem, or architecture). 


 Rene Groebli's photography (including Le Corbusier)