Dailies and Rushes Poems

by Kinsolving, Susan; Howard, Richard

• ISBN13: 9780802136053
• ISBN10: 0802136052
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-02-18
• Publisher: Grove Press

Summary

“The passion, playfulness, and regret in these wonderful poems will make many women think this book was written just for them.” — Susan Cheever

“Susan Kinsolving’s poems skate with a dark elegance on the thin ice between the upper air and a deepening sorrow, between the day’s figures and memory’s pattern. But she’s headed towards love: the distant shore, the beckoning warmth; and by the end of Dailies & Rushes she has gotten herself — and, to our delight and gratitude, brought us as well—triumphantly there.” — J. D. McClatchy

“What rings with authenticity in Susan Kinsolving’s poems is a lovely severity. . . . Sorrow and courage and pleasure register themselves in lucid distillations, like the purities of winter air.” — Anthony Hecht

“‘Things just are,’ Susan Kinsolving writes, in a matter-of-fact tone that belies a fiery intensity. In her poetry, commonplace things are imbued with a magical aura. Her wry wit clarifies as it deepens a tragic vision.” — Grace Schulman

“In her first major collection Susan Kinsolving shows herself to be a poet of ravenous amplitudes, of wit schooled by feeling, of observations had owed by memory, and of landscape rising to what she calls ‘an oblique sublimity’ which is also the hallmark of her art.” — Edward Hirsch

Table of Contents

On The Poems Of Susan Kinsolving	xi
Winter Watch	1	(8)
The Gift	3	(1)
Without	4	(1)
Snow Sleep	5	(1)
Cubes On A Curve	6	(1)
From December To February	7	(1)
Peelings	8	(1)
Breakage	9	(20)
Our Fields	11	(1)
Walking After Winter	12	(1)
Leaving	13	(1)
Walking Back	14	(1)
Snarls	15	(1)
In Preparation	16	(1)
Writing You Of Wessex	17	(1)
Sequins	18	(1)
Parting Gift	19	(1)
Basement	20	(3)
Lock And Key	23	(1)
Shades Of Green	24	(1)
Admission Of Two	25	(1)
A Bride Again	26	(1)
Sotto Voce	27	(2)
Other Worlds	29	(26)
The Night Nurse	31	(1)
Waiting Them Out	32	(1)
Masses Of Marsh Marigolds	33	(1)
Saving Binge	34	(1)
Part Italian	35	(1)
In Venice Reading About Cambodia	36	(1)
Harari Township Depot	37	(1)
Contagious Magic	38	(2)
Dance Steps	40	(1)
The Rest	41	(1)
Protocol	42	(1)
Partial Praise	43	(1)
Ode	44	(1)
Our Second Airedale	45	(2)
Dried Butterflies	47	(2)
My Late Father's Junk Mail	49	(1)
Semblance of Reality	50	(1)
Last Call	51	(1)
Elegy	52	(1)
Happenstance	53	(2)
Small Bouquets	55	(16)
The Garden Green, The Garden Gone	57, 58	(59)
The Dictionary Under Mountain Fringe	59	(1)
An Insomniac's Syringa	60	(1)
Beginning	61	(1)
The Lotus Floats	62	(1)
My Old Crimson Geranium	63	(1)
Eight Zinnias	64	(1)
Ne-M'Oubliez-Pas	65	(1)
To An Amaryllis Bulb	66	(1)
Monologue Of An Amaryllis	67	(1)
Small Alchemies	68	(1)
A Hand-To-Mouth Existence	69	(2)
Summer Scenes	71	(10)
The Forge	73	(1)
August Island	74	(2)
Watercolor	76	(1)
Off Standard Time	77	(1)
Summer Storm	78	(1)
When She Sleeps	79	(1)
The Jellyflsh	80	(1)
By Heart	81
Dailies And Rushes	83
Thirteen By Thirteen	84
Half Note	85
Igniting	86
Farther Than This	87
House Lights Down	88

Excerpts

Chapter One

WINTER WATCH

THE GIFT

In red foil paper was my present, just

as I had asked: a magnifying glass. I

was five, but my dismay was huge

intensified by feigned gratitude. What

to say? where was the word of my mistake?

In silence, I enlarged snowflakes,

pine needles, carpet threads, six

crumbs of cake, and the dark pupils

of my dog's eyes. But the word hid

elsewhere, almost disguised, as glass

might be the illusion of clarity. And so

it's been in all my words and hopes:

poems, the elusive gift, the microscope.

WITHOUT

I saw a stick

wandering over snowdrifts

cheerful and unassuming

twirling and unarmed.

A Chaplin cane without Charlie

wobbled and poked

making its way

taking its walk alone

a crutch without connection.

It plodded deep

half disappearing in white

while creating and leaving

the shape of its emptiness.

I followed it far

an odd extension I could not grasp

and it went away,

an immaculate line of idea

on which only cold air

was allowed to lean.

SNOW SLEEP

As icicles fell between

the edge of the eave and the night,

my grandmother fell

into what she said was "snow

sleep." The clear points of her

consciousness broke down

into drifts and entered shapes

unseen. The blue flakes

of her old eyes opened

into an absolute. Whiteness

covered over my grandmother

and under the sheets

of those December weeks,

she was deeper than seasons,

she was calmer than cold.

CUBES ON A CURVE

White cubes on a white curve are snow-covered

hives on a snow-covered hill. Walking past

this icy pasture, I hear a hum, a low minor

one, thin as the crystalline lace in the ditch,

distant as the reasons shaping the drift. Who

can come to grips with insects or ice, other

worlds in this? In the inner ear is what

buzzes here. And beyond. I cannot see, but

in the white box is a frozen bee. Clover

catches its breath and sap stops in the trees. Hands

warm as they numb. Gradually, quietly,

momentous forces reduce to minute

degrees. Hope is as elementary as

ancient mercury. Finally, each hum

is nothing but a prayer for one, this one.

FROM DECEMBER TO FEBRUARY

The depth of cold, that bone and tooth of winter, stuns us

as the immensity of ice snaps and settles over the jagged

river, its current turned into a disorder of edges. Only

our senses converge as we stare in silence unable to ask

what holds us here with the wind biting our lips, our gloved

fingertips, numbing us with something sub-zero, a negative

count toward infinity. Last night, the knife points of stars

stopped us from walking into the warmth of a room. Instead,

we stood shivering as if waiting for the black water-taffeta

sky to be slit open, for the silver light to pour out, kindle

its color, and release us from so much space, from the vast

chill of separation, the force of isolation. Even the moon

denied its radiant cradle and suspended a steely scythe.

But we who were born in this season have learned the myths

of its severity, its impervious heart. We will walk

by the river and into the night together. After all, we were

once the infants suited for this frosted earth and frozen air.

We became the children who accepted the chilblains of their own

creations, their small arms feathered with soft flakes, their bodies

lying in an imitation of angels, as ours lie in another shape.

PEELINGS

What is the matter here, but a hearty way

to stew and get through another winter?

The porcelain basin is layered, a cross-hatching

of tattered wet ribbons, earth

orange, dirt brown, root white, the thin

skins that separate space from the heart

of the matter. With the sinews of carrot,

the fortitude of potato, the perseverance

of parsnip, a person can pare down an enigma.

What is unresolved can dissolve, lost

in the broth of seasons. With so many

mouths to feed, so much pith and peeling,

what is the recipe for comfort in our vast

cold? What changes this chill to a fast boil?

Copyright © 1999 Susan Kinsolving. All rights reserved.