Joyce Sutphen: "Seeing, Up Close Again"

Like Gulliver in Brobdingnag, I
swooned to see again the immense
detail of the ordinary world:

the rippling surface of a fingernail,
exactly the color of a horn erupting
through the swirled-hair head of a calf,

the flayed landscape of skin where
catgut, pressing into the finger's
tip, made a ragged canyon,

the beaten sheen of a silver ring
around the pillared finger,
dark-tarnished runes

in its patterned crevices.
Nothing was too tiny for
my hungry eye,

nothing too finely etched.
I had grown weary of smooth
honed perfection, perceived from

a distance. Now, even the smallest
stroke of ink on paper was
deep enough to fold me in.

 
"Seeing, Up Close Again" by Joyce Sutphen, from Naming the Stars: Poems (Holy Cow! Press, 2004). Text as published on Caffeine Destiny: an online magazine.

Art credit: "Gulliver in Brobdingnag" [kissing the hand of the Queen of Brobdingnagia], watercolor illustration from the 1909 edition of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, painted by Arthur Rackham.

 

Joyce Sutphen: "How to Listen"

Tilt your head slightly to one side and lift
your eyebrows expectantly. Ask questions.

Delve into the subject at hand or let
things come randomly. Don't expect answers.

Forget everything you've ever done.
Make no comparisons. Simply listen.

Listen with your eyes, as if the story
you are hearing is happening right now.

Listen without blinking, as if a move
might frighten the truth away forever.

Don't attempt to copy anything down.
Don't bring a camera or a recorder.

This is your chance to listen carefully.
Your whole life might depend on what you hear.

"How to Listen" by Joyce Sutphen, from First Words. © Red Dragonfly Press, 2010.
  
Art credit: Image by an unknown photographer of "Archangel Gabriel," marble sculpture by Ivan Mestrovic (1918).

Joyce Sutphen: "The Book of Hours"

There was that one hour sometime

in the middle of the last century.

It was autumn, and I was in my father's

woods building a house out of branches

and the leaves that were falling like

thousands of letters from the sky.

And there was that hour in Central Park

in the middle of the seventies.

We were sitting on a blanket, listening

to Pete Seeger singing "This land is

your land, this land is my land," and

the Vietnam War was finally over.

I would definitely include an hour

spent in one of the galleries of the

Tate Britain, looking up at the

painting of King Cophetua and

the Beggar Maid, and, afterwards

the walk along the Thames, and

I would also include one of those

hours when I woke in the night and

couldn't get back to sleep thinking

about how nothing I thought was going

to happen happened the way I expected,

and things I never expected to happen did—

just like that hour today, when we saw

the dog running along the busy road,

and we stopped and held on to her

until her owner came along and brought

her home—that was an hour well

spent. Yes, that was a keeper.



"The Book of Hours" by Joyce Sutphen. Published online by The Writer's Almanac, September 9, 2007. © Joyce Sutphen. 

Art credit: "Greg Cook and Coco," photograph taken March 2, 2012, by Gary Cosby Jr./AP Photo/The Decatur Daily (originally color).

Joyce Sutphen: "The Last Things I'll Remember"

The partly open hay barn door, white frame around the darkness,
the broken board, small enough for a child
to slip through.

Walking in the cornfields in late July, green tassels overhead,
the slap of flat leaves as we pass, silent
and invisible from any road.

Hollyhocks leaning against the stucco house, peonies heavy
as fruit, drooping their deep heads
on the dog house roof.

Lilac bushes between the lawn and the woods,
a tractor shifting from one gear into
the next, the throttle opened,

the smell of cut hay, rain coming across the river,
the drone of the hammer mill,
milk machines at dawn.



"The Last Things I'll Remember" by Joyce Sutphen, from First Words. © Red Dragonfly Press, 2010.

Art credit: Untitled image by Greg Hill carrying the caption "A road leads deep into a Kansas cornfield in late July" (originally color).

Joyce Sutphen: "From Out the Cave"

When you have been
at war with yourself
for so many years that
you have forgotten why,
when you have been driving
for hours and only
gradually begin to realize
that you have lost the way,
when you have cut
hastily into the fabric,
when you have signed
papers in distraction,
when it has been centuries
since you watched the sun set
or the rain fall, and the clouds,
drifting overhead, pass as flat
as anything on a postcard;
when, in the midst of these
everyday nightmares, you
understand that you could
wake up,
you could turn
and go back
to the last thing you
remember doing
with your whole heart:
that passionate kiss,
the brilliant drop of love
rolling along the tongue of a green leaf,
then you wake,
you stumble from your cave,
blinking in the sun,
naming every shadow
as it slips.



"From Out the Cave" by Joyce Sutphen, from Straight Out of View. © Beacon Press, 1995.

Photograph credit: Unknown.