Spells. Annie Finch

letters, hands, faces, symbols, stars.

      Each warm friction’s vibration circumscribes

      One more seat in the clearing where we are

      Gathered, circling a home we can’t describe.

      What’s the word but a word that can’t be spoken?

      Who’d tear pleasure out past life’s iron bars?

      Where’s the use of a code that won’t be broken?

      A ring of keys hangs like a question at your side.

      You move through the answering darkness like a key,

      While windows of moonlight branch down the catacombs

      And rustle each prisoner into mystery.

      Each lock, like each room, is alone till the opening comes;

      Your ring reaches one, then another. Liberty

      Repeats down the corridor, doors pulled open wide,

      Exploding more showers of sweetness through the combs

      Whose locks had been waiting for one key to be tried.

      BEACH OF EDGES

      A drift of snow edges a new drift of sand

      As edges grow deeper. It’s March, month of edges.

      Wet rocks yield to pebbles like opening hands.

      The glisten of rockweed trails, splutters, and bends,

      And sparkles of rivulets bounce down in ledges.

      A drift of snow edges a new drift of sand;

      It’s March, month of edges, and I’m left to stand

      Alone outside time as new light pulls and nudges

      Wet rocks. Yield to pebbles like opening hands,

      Light; pull me from winter. How have I planned

      For light that’s not winter, for live light that fledges

      A drift of snow, edges a new drift of sand

      Beyond my last sight, and waves me like a wand

      Out back over the surges of these rocking sedges?

      Wet rocks yield to pebbles like opening hands;

      I want to go back to him, as to the land;

      light, carry me over from the wild old grudges.

      A drift of snow edges a new drift of sand;

      Wet rocks yield to pebbles like opening hands.

      EARTH DAY

      All we want is to find the love

      in the faces of the people we love.

      All we need is to find the dark

      in the nighttime sky, to lie down to sleep

      in the darkness, where stars and moon keep vigil,

      in the silence of a sleeping earth.

      All we require is to wake to sunlight

      in the morning, to simple sky,

      to breathe aloud as the sky is breathing,

      to drink the water of the earth.

      All we need is to touch the planet

      and find it clean where we were born,

      where our ancestors breathed and planted,

      where we live with the plants and birds.

      All we need is to live with the memory

      of a future we want to imagine.

      All we want is to find the love

      in the face of the planet we love.

      REVELRY

      Chairs root. Their trunks are runged with snow.

      Curtains grow velvet thick, like bark,

      in this warm landscape ringed with dark.

      Is passion only revelry?

      Voices believe words and move free.

      Lust moves our lips. Blood fills our skin.

      We bend alive around cup and cloud.

      These are the hours to revel in.

      ARCHITECTURE

      Proportion is life measured open by harmony.

      It vaults us to open like atriums, entering

      our pillared awareness in footsteps, then building

      our spaces with conscious decision. Its mystery

      makes earth that our forest looks back for. Its beauty

      has felt us repeating, then come to repeat us.

      Its answers have carved us like mineral and bent us

      in spirals. Its questions have rocked us past symmetry.

      And, if we have voices that build to a word

      and breathe out through poems, it comes to enclose us

      by seeding the places we know we inhabit—

      (make local, remember, name, touch and are stirred

      in, share with those who understand, love, or oppose us

      (because they live here, in the place we inhabit,

      and believe what we have grown wise believing:

      that belief, like love, rests on no foundation

      but the shapes we know how to make by knowing

      how they enclose us))—

      how they unfold us.

      Poems, 2000–1990

      Point your fire like a flower.

      WATCHING THE WHALE

      A hard gray wave, her fin, walks out on the water

      that thickens to open and then parts open, around her.

      Measured by her delved water, I follow her fill

      into and out of green light in the depth she has spun

      through the twenty-six fathoms of her silent orison,

      then sink with her till she rises, lulled with the krill.

      Beads of salt spray stop me, like metal crying.

      Her cupped face breathes its spouts, like a jewel-wet prong.

      In a cormorant’s barnacle path, I trail her, spun

      down through my life in the making of her difference,

      fixing my mouth, with the offerings of silence,

      on her dark whale-road where all green partings run,

      where ocean’s hidden bodies twist fathoms around her,

      making her green-fed hunger grow fertile as water.

      PARAVALEDELLENTINE: A PARADELLE

       For Glen

      Come to me with your warning sounds of the tender seas.

      Come to me with your warning sounds of the tender seas.

      Move me the way the seas’