Patchwork

(The Artist Fernand Léger among His Works
by Robert Doisneau, 1912-1994, French photographer

“From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.”

~ Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), American author, in an interview in 1958

PATCHWORK

I have been thinking at random
on the universe
or rather, how nothing in the universe
is random —

(there’s nothing like presumption late at night.)

My sumptuous
trash bag of colors —
Laura Ashley cottons —
waits to be cut
and stitched and patched

but there’s a mechanical feel
about the handle
of my secondhand sewing machine,
with its flowers
and Singer painted orange on it.
And its iron wheel.

My back is to the dark.
Somewhere out there
are stars and bits of stars
and little bits of bits.
And swiftness and brightness and drift.

But is it craft or art?

I will be here
till midnight,
cross-legged in the dining-room,
logging triangles and diamonds,
cutting and aligning,
finding greens in pinks
and burgundies in whites
until I finish it.

There’s no reason in it.

Only when it’s laid
right across the floor,
sphere on square
and seam on seam,
in a good light —
a night-sky spread —
will it start to hit me.

These are not bits.
They are pieces.

And the pieces fit.

~ Eavan Boland, born 1944, Irish poet

The Moment

Each Friday we provide the link to the blog that is hosting a celebration of poetry around the blogosphere. At that site you can find the links to the many other blogs that are posting poems (new and old), discussions of poems, and reviews of poetry books.

Enjoy the festivities!

The host this week is Heidi Mordhorst.

You can visit her here at My Juicy Little Universe.


(Backyards, white-line woodcut by Blanche Lazell,
1876-1936, American artist)

THE MOMENT

A neighborhood.
At dusk.

Things are getting ready
to happen
out of sight.

Stars and moths.
And rinds slanting around fruit.

But not yet.

One tree is black.
One window is yellow as butter.

A woman leans down to catch a child
who has run into her arms
this moment.

Stars rise.
Moths flutter
Apple sweeten in the dark.

~ Eavan Boland, born 1944, Irish poet

We Are Always Too Late

(Café in Soho, London, 1955 by Willy Ronis, 1910-2009,
French photographer)

The poet recalls her role in the drama of a romance — her thoughts trace what was and what should have been.

WE ARE ALWAYS TOO LATE

Memory
Is in two parts.

First the re-visiting:

the way even now I can see
those lovers at the café table. She is weeping.

It is New England, breakfast time, winter. Behind her,
outside the picture window, is
a stand of white pines.

New snow falls and the old,
losing its balance in the branches,
showers down,
adding fractions to it. Then

The re-enactment. Always that.
I am getting up, pushing away
coffee. Always I am going towards her.

The flush and scald is
to her forehead now, and back down to her neck.

I raise one hand. I am pointing to
those trees, I am showing her our need for these
beautiful upstagings of
what we suffer by
what survives. And she never even sees me.

~ Eavan Boland, born in 1944, Irish poet