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Sarah Gridley

Insofar

as the golden larch grows out another spring,
insofar as the needles look gold or copper
with the close of the growing season—and fall
like the milk teeth of a mammal, deciduous,
insofar as deciduous is what falls down or off, really
what is cut off, insofar as a thing can be cut off
from its other, extraneous, as in the making of
decisions, as in the feeling of this being severed
from an adjacent feeling for that, as if these feelings
had not a common vertex and a common side,
insofar as the tree you have in mind is both
coniferous and deciduous, could it not be turning
a color darkly adjacent to green, insofar as
coniferous is cone-bearing but not also evergreen
in every case, insofar as a golden larch is real,
and real is then the feeling of those cones
shaped like small artichokes, in a mast season,
when they boss the golden larch like pieces
of ornamental carving covering the point
where the ribs in a vault or ceiling cross,
insofar as architecture might be analogous
to arboriculture, or until a wind or creature
should detach a cone, which will easily detach,
insofar as it is a golden, and not a true larch,
and once detached, will cast its long-winged seeds
to life, insofar as life is there to catch them, to heave
and bury them, insofar as actions are decisions
as to what is or is not continuous.

 

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Vol. 42, No. 1

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Writer’s Notebook

Writer’s Notebook—Field Dress Portal

Sarah Audsley

Writer’s Notebook—Field Dress Portal

Writing this poem was not a commentary on a rivalry between the sister arts—poetry and painting—but more an experiment in the ekphrastic poetic mode.

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