Point of Departure<\/p>\n
tongue-tied, she sculpts little numbers, bits of alphabet<\/p>\n
feels the language out in air gone thick and malleable<\/p>\n
as clay or mud, as the breathiness of meringue<\/p>\n
what she wants is control though she doesn’t like to admit this<\/p>\n
(not ladylike) what she wants is to name everything<\/p>\n
petiole: stalk attaching leaf to stem<\/p>\n
verso: left-hand page of manuscript<\/p>\n
she invents names sometimes–or similes anyway<\/p>\n
explaining and explaining, drafting new rules of order<\/p>\n
like a morning of miserable phone calls, which is different from<\/p>\n
the clean pain of a paper cut on the tongue<\/p>\n
punctilio: a fine point of etiquette (ladylike)<\/p>\n
she wants control–like the carpenter, not the architect<\/p>\n
she wants the house to fit the cosmos buzzing inside her left hemisphere<\/p>\n
she wants the baseboard to fit exactly the angle between floor and wall<\/p>\n
no unexplained spaces, 90 degrees–there’s a close miracle in that<\/p>\n
the click click of wood fitting against wood, yes, like that<\/p>\n
a pleasurable green–color of newborn aphids<\/p>\n
she wants everything named and simple, everything simple<\/p>\n
everything named with shapes that open up, willing to be understood<\/p>\n
(she feels ridiculous wanting this, tongue-tied and green)<\/p>\n
fortitude: the moment between this breath and, yes, the next one<\/p>\n
“Petiole”…I really should have one of TadMack’s fabulous flower photos to accompany this poem, shouldn’t I?? “Point of Departure” comes from Gillian Wegener’s collection The Opposite of Clairvoyance<\/a> from Sixteen Rivers Press. She’s local–lives in my town–and much of her poetry is about nature, birds, seasons, interactions with others–the small things of life that are also the most important. Her poems are so visual, too, but this one in particular I keep coming back to again and again, thinking about the myriad of reasons why I write, why I draw…<\/p>\n Anyway, I’ve really been wanting to contribute something for Poetry Friday, and I’ve been so intimidated because not only am I not a poet but I’m in no way nearly as poetry-literate as many of the participants. Still, Wegener’s poetry speaks to me so strongly that I wanted to share one. (And I might share another at some point!!) More fantastic poems can be found at Wild Rose Reader<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Point of Departure tongue-tied, she sculpts little numbers, bits of alphabet feels the language out in air gone thick and malleable as clay or…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2,93,10],"class_list":["post-2050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-af","tag-poetry-friday","tag-views"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2050"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2050\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4801,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2050\/revisions\/4801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}