Maxine Chernoff
“We are like plants that have the one choice of being in or out of the light.” --Simone Weil
Out of nature, out of time, sensed as a hunger for justice
Or love. Richly ornamented as a mountain of lace or starkly withheld
as yesterday’s greeting. It is not day when, eyes closed, you harvest
names. Paper offers its whiteness to your list of days.
Alone and counting, you reach the expectation of arrival,
borders crossed, windows open to the sudden day and its register of hours.
Someone says “session,” as if to mean time enclosed by reason or want.
You reply without words. Speech is an act you must justify.
And then the rain comes, to alter the world’s dull motifs.
Rest inside of language, my love, surrendering intention. .
View
Calendars fill with lies. Who softens the day's bright ledger?
Posed in a room full of stillness, nothing drifts into view
but their shadows, gathered. It is the same as flying,
to drift in a vaporous sky. Nothing matches
its wispy guises, its tender undulations.
And you, dear eyes, pass as Venus did,
in a year of miracles, over the face of the sun.
Subplot
Lost on a night when reference
suffices for human events,
the slow distance between bodies
reaches for narratives of innocence
or crushes as fallen feathers.
On a plank of sleep he sees the empty
tree, flown birds’ narrow hotel
of blue and leaf and fragrant wood,
light, an envelope in her marble hand.
If reaching means proximity, life thinks
otherwise, leaves books open to weather,
pummels history with slow report. Explanations
slip as diamonds in a mossy sea, or time,
a science of feeling. Eclipse imminent,
papered walls suffer with impunity
the loss of probable light. We are not alone
with our discipline, the smooth stones we carve
from childhood to convergence to dawn.
__________
Maxine Chernoff’s recent poems are from a book called HERE, to be published by Counterpath Press, many of which have very long lines and deal with universal themes like love and grief and their negotiation in language that renames and sometimes reverses self and world.
The author of fourteen books of poems and six books of fiction, Maxine Chernoff is the recipient of a 2013 NEA in Poetry. She is also the co-winner of the PEN USA Translation Prize for her translation with Paul Hoover of The Selected Works of Friedrich Hoelderlin. She edits New American Writing and chairs the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.
“We are like plants that have the one choice of being in or out of the light.” --Simone Weil
Out of nature, out of time, sensed as a hunger for justice
Or love. Richly ornamented as a mountain of lace or starkly withheld
as yesterday’s greeting. It is not day when, eyes closed, you harvest
names. Paper offers its whiteness to your list of days.
Alone and counting, you reach the expectation of arrival,
borders crossed, windows open to the sudden day and its register of hours.
Someone says “session,” as if to mean time enclosed by reason or want.
You reply without words. Speech is an act you must justify.
And then the rain comes, to alter the world’s dull motifs.
Rest inside of language, my love, surrendering intention. .
View
Calendars fill with lies. Who softens the day's bright ledger?
Posed in a room full of stillness, nothing drifts into view
but their shadows, gathered. It is the same as flying,
to drift in a vaporous sky. Nothing matches
its wispy guises, its tender undulations.
And you, dear eyes, pass as Venus did,
in a year of miracles, over the face of the sun.
Subplot
Lost on a night when reference
suffices for human events,
the slow distance between bodies
reaches for narratives of innocence
or crushes as fallen feathers.
On a plank of sleep he sees the empty
tree, flown birds’ narrow hotel
of blue and leaf and fragrant wood,
light, an envelope in her marble hand.
If reaching means proximity, life thinks
otherwise, leaves books open to weather,
pummels history with slow report. Explanations
slip as diamonds in a mossy sea, or time,
a science of feeling. Eclipse imminent,
papered walls suffer with impunity
the loss of probable light. We are not alone
with our discipline, the smooth stones we carve
from childhood to convergence to dawn.
__________
Maxine Chernoff’s recent poems are from a book called HERE, to be published by Counterpath Press, many of which have very long lines and deal with universal themes like love and grief and their negotiation in language that renames and sometimes reverses self and world.
The author of fourteen books of poems and six books of fiction, Maxine Chernoff is the recipient of a 2013 NEA in Poetry. She is also the co-winner of the PEN USA Translation Prize for her translation with Paul Hoover of The Selected Works of Friedrich Hoelderlin. She edits New American Writing and chairs the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.