Writing by Martin Stolen
Epiphany 4: Anyone's West
Other Writing:
» Two Ants on a Stone
» Feathers
» Tasha Creek
» Three Poems on Perspective
Epiphany 1: Objects, Landscape, and Context: An Epiphany in Four Poems
Redness
I wish I had a place to stay
among these Alabama hills
granite wrapped and roiling
shaking mumbled praise from graphite pens
to leave the breaking, lacquered surface of my city
to lay against your slowly trembling sands
and come undone
a coalescent dissociation of my muscles and my bones
you ask me, whale-backed hills,
with all the heavy redness
in your aching voice and in your aching lines,
to participate, perhaps a little early on,
in some unshrouded dissipation
with desert greens and browns
to watch the spreading of my particles
should I will my bustling blood
to seize and clot?
to let my secret marrowed chambers open up?
Salt
we’ve got many versions
of ourselves and all around us
toes sunk deep in watered sand
along the strand of a baking inshore sea
they’re all too like my grandmother’s furrowed hand
mixing up the wheaty sponge
the other reaching out for salt
the taste of my own fingers
after three days in the field
quick tang through finely coated dust
and after that, a thorough washing at your sink
tan on white, splayed fingers imposed upon ceramic tile
but you were standing there, expectant
after a long withering in the bathtub
cold air from an unheeded and unlooked for window
marking out your pores
against some greater smoothness
then the salt again
warm and pressing
against your crackling lips
the pooled divet of your collarbone
the smiling curve along the bottom of your breast
the nearly endless, nearly perfect
echoed plane of inner thigh
and on to other things than salt
Houses
we build so many things
buttressed against
inanimate and animate stones
and all the minuteless writhings of nature
coming in cold from the rain
bringing with them
some stillborn recognition of our sameness
and then the careful, bridled knowledge
of our wish to separate
from the horrors in the jaw of a field mouse
the electric snap-tang-crunch of falling timber
the cloying, piney taste
contained within the jellied entrails of a mountain beetle
all these things
come in with confrontations
in, through, on out the other side
to leave our densely wooded houses to reconsider
Ambivalence
he says we all are vessels
each a willful sack of semi-ordered particles
all dashed and mangled
by an un-deciphered chaos
within the structure of our cells
she says we all want money
two parties as distinct and inseparable
as dusted moths and yellow-burning porch lights
he says all we need is nudity
to lack the essence of our reason
to saw our logs and make our burbling babies
in small, defended huts
settled shallow in de-molded lands
she says our hands are soft and pink
not used to touching trees
our noses unencumbered by the moldy scent of loam
our livers and our lungs
as guiless and transient
as a ragtag bunch of homeless boys
cooking tender a tough-old rooster in a thrown-out coffee can
born with gucci and mercedes-benz
but trying out the stench across the tracks
he says we pass our moments
doing good or bad
our cities drinking too much water
drying up the towns on down the way
our civil sanctions choking all with ink and paper
our travels etched in fumes
the ringing echo of our politics
making change or not
she says we all should
stand in circles digging holes
to put a scalpel to the architectured membrane
of our guarded ribs
to give our thickly dripping hearts
to the cradled soil
in the crooks of oak tree roots
to rise and watch the redness soak down in
then, after the giving of our iron to the trunk,
to fill the holes
and, in deference to its verticality,
to lay back down again
our backs pressed by gravity against more sated ground
our sleep to slow down the current of our time
to match the trees
Back to top
Two Ants on a Stone
I was in northern Nevada once
and there, on a hot and crackling boulder,
between a desert sage and clumps of desert grass,
I saw two ants dragging a dead moth
a few times their size
across the surface of the stone
mottled gray and brown
its wingtips
broken and stratified and dusted
with that inexplicable powder
that falls like baker’s sugar
from the wings
two red ants
with struggling jaws and struggling legs
two herculean ants
heaving the weight of chitin and of wing
across the flowered lichen
but my intruding iris, massive black and blue
interrupted their jointed labor
they dropped the moth
and melted down the rock
like drops of coffee toward the earth below
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Feathers
the wind it shall be endless
with its taste like sun-baked soybeans
leftover from the redly chugging combines
‘midst the knotted grass and chunking clods of Minnesota dirt
the wind it will unravel ‘cross the canopies
of aspen green
old reams of murky-scalloped walleye scales
and a father’s sense of what is decent
the wind shall take away your neighbor’s leather hat
from his spit-foam tangle of whiting hair
on down through other whistling spaces
between alfalfa flowers
over-top some burrowed gopher
through a finely tuning fence
to another farmer’s hands spotted and cracked
by tractors wheels and iron tools
the wind shall give its grains
to the opened flower of your outer ear
so you must stand awkwardly, with dampened bits of cotton
in dusty shoes
beside the door of your mother’s house
while guests wait beside their food
the wind shall leave you homeless
without shelter
without a candle flame
to keep away the edges of the room
the wind shall whisper something fierce
within the echoes of an alley
inside the gripping chambers of a lover’s cheeks
the wind shall whip the feathers from your hair
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