the last place i lived by k. alma peterson book preview
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One of the early poems in this book concludes: “My wild side would like to know.” If yours would too, read The Last Place I Lived. The collection abounds in wit and verbal play, yet the reward in reading comes from an intelligence lodged deep, directing the lines in sophisticated ways, the “afterimage // glassily repeated in the hawk’s beveled eye.” K. Alma Peterson knows what to leave out—an ability to inventively compress language is one of her gifts. In context, the lines “let me / cut you an armful” so clearly offer both the neighbor’s flowers as well as the neighbor’s tenderness. These poems inhabit dead trees, rabbits lurking inside of magic hats, and high clouds. Through the unexpected, they explore the human, sometimes isolated, sometimes searching or sharing, “losing more / trailed wisps of self in billows.” A “dust-to-dust anxiety” recurs throughout; death is even a way of connecting to family in the memorable poem “Collective Sense of Sleep.” The book’s themes never overtake their delight in language (“Murphy has a law and a bed in the wall”). The poetry seems to move forward at the request of sound, providing a sense of inevitability though this is clearly surprising as well as accomplished work. —Julie Funderburk, author of The Door that Always Opens, LSU Press In this deeply textured book, Kathy Peterson’s playful, brilliant language counterpoints very serious matter—the blunt fissures of survival and pain, creating a tension and energy that drives these poems. They might feel like sleight of hand but are really transformative, like alchemy. She sums it up best herself: “…straddling the gap between tame/art and reckless science, they play dangerously//turning experimentation into evidence…” (Trains Derail in the Deepest Woods and We Take Positions We Cannot Defend.) It is stunning work, and it makes you want to sing.— John Minczeski, author of A Letter to Serafin, University of Akron PressKathy Peterson’s new collection, The Last Place I Lived, begins with Rilke’s words as epigraph: Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows. Here are some of Peterson’s places: the circus, the body, in its flesh and as a work of art, the beach, a narrator in rehabilitation and in yoga class, inside the mind of the narrator where language spills, torques, makes the whole world unfamiliar—“a gardener’s heart lies bleeding,/her whip in petals. Pity, its own/nemesis…”, inside the persona of the state of Florida, inside “ Memory’s jagged coast”---all these places, and more. Suffering has happened…it echoes in images that come and go, some in surreal poems, some in poems where we readers may feel a bit more grounded. We keep checking these poems to make sure we are keeping communion with the spirit who created them. A life has happened…keeps happening, and the narrator in these vivid, surprising poems tells us, “The last place I lived, I mean/really lived, was a treehouse in a strangler/fig. An entire graveyard of them/yellowing and shedding//everything but light./ I held a lantern//for that purpose, to that end.” Yes, some extraordinary light in this collection, the poet holding the lantern with great authority to grant vision. —Deborah Keenan, author of ten collections of poems, and, from tiger to prayer, a book of writing ideas.K. Alma Peterson is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Her poems have been widely published in print and online journals. She is the author of Was There No Interlude When Light Sprawled the Fen, BlazeVOX Books, 2010. She lives in Minnesota and Florida. She also is occasionally given to bursts of experimentation with printmaking, painting and drawing. Book Information:· Paperback: 84 pages · Binding: Perfect-Bound · Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] · ISBN: 978-1-60964-197-9One of the early poems in this book concludes: “My wild side would like to know.” If yours would too, read The Last PlacTRANSCRIPT
THE LAST PLACE I LIVED
A COLLECTION OF POEMS BY K. ALMA PETERSON
B L A Z E V O X [ B O O K S ] Buffalo, New York
The Last Place I Lived by K. Alma Peterson Copyright © 2015 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza Cover Art by First Edition ISBN: 978-1-60964-197-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2014954646 BlazeVOX [books] 131 Euclid Ave Kenmore, NY 14217 [email protected]
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B l a z e V O X
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my circle of writer friends, who gave me, and these poems, help and encouragement: Charisse Gendron, Cindra Halm, Terri Ford, Kath Jesme, Maeve Kinkead, Cheryl Ekstrum, and Rosemary Jensen. Thanks especially to Kath Jesme for skillfully helping shape an unwieldy manuscript into this book. The author gratefully acknowledges the following journals for previous publication, as follows: "Sleight with Homage to Linen" and "Principle Trainer" from IthacaLit online Spring 2015 "Coyote" from Thirty Days: the Best of the 30/30 Project's First Year, published by Tupelo Press, copyright 2015 "Collective Sense of Sleep" from E.T.A, published by Wesleyan University, 2014 "Divertimento" appears in Kestrel Issue 34.
Table of Contents Part 1 ......................................................................................................... 13
Securing the Tent ....................................................................................... 15 Inelegant Human Form ............................................................................ 16 My iPhone Channels Sal Dali on Delray Beach ............................... 17 Dead Tree as Central Figure in Icy Dream ........................................ 18 The Great Moot .......................................................................................... 19 Impersonal Impersonation .................................................................... 20 Cat, at Length .............................................................................................. 21 Blue Bowl Ringing ..................................................................................... 22 Contortionist ............................................................................................... 23 Mind Reader ............................................................................................... 24 Florida ........................................................................................................... 25 Mabel, formerly Mary .............................................................................. 26 Sea Cow ......................................................................................................... 27 Stage Name (rocket) ................................................................................. 28 Canter ........................................................................................................... 29 Handler ........................................................................................................ 30 Wardrobe ..................................................................................................... 31 Reader of Second Thoughts .................................................................... 32 Walking on Stilts ........................................................................................ 33 Aubade ......................................................................................................... 34 Eastern (anything but) Standard Time ................................................ 35 From Shore ................................................................................................. 36 Trains Derail in Deepest Woods and We Take Positions We Cannot Defend ........................................................................................ 37 Playing With Magic .................................................................................. 38 Chiropractor to the Clowns ................................................................... 39 City of Domesticity ................................................................................... 40 Boomerang ................................................................................................... 41 Principle Trainer ....................................................................................... 42 Triolet for Static Trapeze ........................................................................ 43 Florida Historic Hotel .............................................................................. 44 What We Don’t Know Won’t Become Us .......................................... 45 Separation, with Residential Shifts ...................................................... 46 Sleight with Homage to Linen ................................................................ 47 Alligator in Retirement ............................................................................ 48
Part 11 ...................................................................................................... 49 Collective Sense of Sleep ......................................................................... 51 Seeing It Coming ........................................................................................ 52 Not Quite Quits .......................................................................................... 54 Silo in the middle of town: settled grains true enough ................... 55 No Tomorrow ............................................................................................. 56 Pastoral for One Mistaken ....................................................................... 57 A little rain, then. Less ............................................................................. 58 Dear Now-you’ve-gone-and-done-it, ................................................... 59 Not a Muscle Moves Me Any Longer .................................................. 60 Ghost Work .................................................................................................. 61 No Clouds Passing ..................................................................................... 62 Vespers ......................................................................................................... 63 Living Room ................................................................................................ 64 Once We Fly ............................................................................................... 65 Month of Sun Days ................................................................................... 66 Passage .......................................................................................................... 67 The Nomenclature of Pain ..................................................................... 68 Coyote ........................................................................................................... 69 With the Cold Moon Came .................................................................... 70 On the Long Life of Sound ...................................................................... 71 Clearing House ........................................................................................... 72 The Salt Works of Random Chemistry ................................................ 73 Divertimento .............................................................................................. 74 Investigations of a Made-up Mind ........................................................ 75 More of the Same Morning .................................................................... 76 Dame Fortuna, I’d Know You Anywhere ............................................ 77 One of the Birds ......................................................................................... 78 Of Late the Prescient Palms ................................................................... 79 Span ............................................................................................................... 80 Dame Fortuna On the Limits of Gratitude ......................................... 81 Debate Among High Clouds .................................................................. 82
THE LAST PLACE I LIVED
Part 1
“Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke
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Securing the Tent My circus is in town. No tickets are for sale and a flap about why not is underway, starting with a woodpecker insisting that a tree give succor or it will take its tapping elsewhere. All the acts breathe free. I zip the door shut and tack a note to the oak, thinking the ringleader might buy a ring. I don’t need three. Promising to listen doesn’t guarantee my offer will be met. Dollars on the penny I’d give to make a home foldable and fireproof, makeshift and shiftless.
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Inelegant Human Form Coaxed from a block of softwood only so far. Glitter for bruises, snaps for bones. I concentrate on the face: grim determination slash-mark for the mouth. Xs for eyes (don’t make me look) like a folk art doll. A leg turns the wrong direction, a hand unsteady on the ledge pulls her costume off. I wrap her in my shredded clothes, remove slivers as if pine was not a feeling (don’t make me think) the air cracks and trees fall ill
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My iPhone Channels Sal Dali on Delray Beach Ah, little wonder: the beach way slant, breakers melt away the sand. Nimble we wouldn’t think of grasping tonal nuances slipping through a split-screen past. The star avatar depicts himself slicing sky. My shadow tours his muse amusing us no pixel bend. Chisel/Click technically stark mistakes dark matter for a gull’s reprint. Our weight triangulates If we pivot nothing stands without its edge. Unless of course we walk upon Unearth.
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Dead Tree as Central Figure in Icy Dream after a photograph by Kirsten Miles It was cold when I was planted a common sprig near a family of graceful foreign transplants my gnarled heartwood knew a city would grow up around me we would watch each other alter refurbished by the brush and tan of unplanned passage. Demolished or let stand. In my final leafless pose I am the negative of lightning, caught and held. An afterimage glassily repeated in the hawk’s beveled eye.
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The Great Moot Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment ---- Rumi I can make the bed in no time flat, your flat is my fitted. Murphy has a law and a bed in the wall, a wall’s worth of posters to be taken down or papered over. Lost forever in the stick-together. We fish the unexplored majority of brain, reel across the barrier, out the synapse, and come to drift beyond neural tides of information you can never use. Blue is for befuddlement among the yellow lures, green is the guileless worm among the reeds. Your reed, her bassoon, my reedy memory plays more tricks than a baton has waves. Conducted when the Octopus of Pain brushes my ankle with its tentative tentacle, the privilege is all my sensation. Is my ration of discomfort a seahorse or a manatee? My wild side would like to know.
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Impersonal Impersonation Jars of jeers in my glove box & the Buddha mask secured. The din of many fenders bending. In my sleep I’m halfway down Aisle 6, scanning sugared sneers, frosted snorts, minted sorries. No ideal retort exists. I rue therefore I err. Tomorrow I will box and sip my skills set, sans instructions. Tines and sporks included in the picnic pack. Appetite ships separately.
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Cat, at Length She outstretches arced and arched human in size and attitude. The furniture is hers to claw. I’m on the arm of the divan she touches absentmindedly making sure her smaller self is shredded evidence. We can’t tell if transmigration is the old mind’s word or deed. The cat bites me lightly shutters her reptilian eyes restores this painstaking world.
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Blue Bowl Ringing Overflowing light reveals filaments of dark left from my shadow Cormorants gather in the manmade lake no less than ten all altos Gecko by gecko twig after twig springs lizard lightly to shade Gumbo limbo trees evoke Ganesh reaching low to clear the way 1 is robin’s egg 10 is morning glory what’s your level of blue?
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Contortionist In rehabilitation I sewed my hankering between twelve layers of resolve. Blue as wonder was the tug of sailfish on my line. Release me back into the brine. In the historic village fishing lines and lunch lines merged. Squared might be a better word than cloned, my efficiency expert opines. Ghostly holy is my third-rail charm. I bet my last bitcoin on an internet evangelist who turned out to be an avatar. A sympathetic green-thumber reduced my dust-to-dust anxiety. In yoga class I balance on one leg until the tide comes home and the roosters chicken out.
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Mind Reader Couldn’t door less. Prying into soulless windows, crowbar to the eyebrow valance painless. Crows chortle uh uh in amusement. Their muse and mine canary on inside the coal bin. It’s been weedy on the premises we whack. A gardener’s heart lies bleeding, her whip in petals. Pity, its own nemesis. Whichever chamber dominates her morel ears tips his tympanic sense of time. They make a better stem than system. Trusses constitute a small component of the big attraction. Say no more be done about betrothal. There’s a catch in every roof. Gutters clog. I wear down at the melds. Hold the handrail on ascent. I see your lantern swaying.