Ocean Avenue

by Morling, Malena

• ISBN13: 9780932826701
• ISBN10: 0932826709
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-03-01
• Publisher: New Issues Poetry & Prose

Summary

"In the shape of a human body/I am visiting the earth; /the trees visit/in the shapes of trees". Thus begins Ocean Avenue's opening poem as Malena Morling examines the givens of our daily lives and discovers them to be more mysterious than we had supposed. The poet's sense of wonder is contagious whether she views the world from her seat on a train, from the window of her apartment, or from the streets of the city. Through a subtle, mediated surrealism, Morling reins in the urban landscapes of New York, drawing the reader into her meditations on the temporal and the spatial, on language itself.

Table of Contents

Foreword	3	(6)
Philip Levine
One
Visiting	9	(1)
We Are Here	10	(1)
Constellations	11	(1)
On the 747	12	(1)
In a Motel Room at Dawn	13	(1)
Aether	14	(1)
You Look Outside	15	(1)
Self Portrait with Lights and Teeth	16	(2)
For Joseph Cornell	18	(1)
For F.M. Who Did Not Get Killed Yesterday on 57th Street	19	(1)
On Seventh Avenue South	20	(1)
For Bartleby	21	(1)
Osip Mandelstam's Egg	22	(1)
Let Me Say This	23	(1)
Three-Card Monte	24	(1)
Not Separate	25	(2)
Three Daffodils	27	(1)
Among Pillars of Dust	28	(1)
The Dark Drinks the Insides of Mirrors	29	(4)
Two
For Alice	33	(1)
The Conception	34	(1)
Photo Album	35	(2)
Russian Dolls	37	(1)
Dusk	38	(1)
Ashes	39	(1)
Looking Through the Nictitating Membrane	40	(2)
How Wondrous Strange It Was at That Moment to Be in the Flesh	42	(1)
Ocean Avenue	43	(12)
Three
Like Tile	55	(1)
Standing on the Earth Among the Cows	56	(1)
May All Beings Have Happiness and the Causes of Happiness	57	(2)
In This World	59	(2)
First Thought	61	(1)
Air	62	(1)
For the Woman with the Radio	63	(1)
Without You There Would Be No City	64	(1)
Where Is It Anyway?	65	(2)
Letters	67	(2)
Another Poem of Gifts	69	(2)
When I Was Living Near the Ocean	71	(1)
Physics Problem	72	(1)
The Couple	73	(1)
In the Moon of Making Fat	74	(1)
Afte Ritsos	75