Saturday, January 5, 2013

"He would have been embarrassed to hear it said, but I think Ross was among the chosen, and I think that on some level he himself knew this (though at the same time the idea of "being chosen" would have seemed impossibly romantic, or "poetic" to him). He intimates something of all this in "A Dark Plum":

 A silence which settles the night
 unsettles me.
 It is not the absence of the yellow
 in one’s bright eyes but

 a slight cooling in the head, sealing
 love to the sharp darkness.
 Out of that black, my name comes sailing
 in at me, chiffon and in

 someone else’s voice, a
 soft pin put to me directly. "Ross"
 it says off the night. The voice says "Ross"
 like Hamlet’s father. It falls from 
 any cliff.

 At night you learn that you can’t talk
 to yourself but only to Hamlet,
 to his father, to a cliff.



http://www3.nd.edu/~ndr/issues/ndr16/Henry%20Weinfield/Weinfield%20Review.html

One hair on the pillow marks
off the world. Returns me to options
I think will be the same. A
feeling of uselessness

when I chuck memories into the
future. That I am chocolate in the sun
of some bright arrangement, made thick

in someone’s heated mind,
her possibilities.

I don’t learn from my own poems.

To take the plum in one hand
and with the other wave myself

thru, forgetting the
orchards, that dazzling
in the warm light.

An old friend knows
enough to get off the
train when it can’t make
the next stop.

- Ross Feld

So the heart breaks
Into small shadows
Almost so random
They are meaningless
Like a diamond
Has at the center of it a diamond
Or a rock
Rock.

- Jack Spicer