Edges & Fray. Danielle Vogel

      

      EDGES

      &

      FRAY

      WESLEYAN POETRY

      EDGES

      &

      FRAY

      ON LANGUAGE, PRESENCE, AND (INVISIBLE) ANIMAL ARCHITECTURES

      DANIELLE VOGEL

      WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS / MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT

      Wesleyan University Press

      Middletown CT 06459

       www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

      2020 © Danielle Vogel

      All rights reserved

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      Designed by Crisis

      Typeset in Joanna

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request

      Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8195-7921-8

      Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8195-7922-5

      5 4 3 2 1

      Cover photographs by Danielle Vogel.

      CONTENTS

       EDGES & FRAY 1

       : SLOWNESS, TIME — 87

       NESTS 99

       BIRD RESOURCES 107

       A NOTE OF THANKS 109

      EDGES

      &

      FRAY

      NOTE TO READER

      This book is intentionally structured as a series of filaments. I cast a thought, leave it to begin another fray, and then return. And while I wove the fragments and photographs in a way that can be read linearly, I invite you to lift these poems in any order, consider the roving edge of a nest, and, then, weave them into concordance, into any arrangement that, for you, holds.

      /

      I begin to create these vessels

      foraged for and pressed

      into function

      a book , of string and filament -- /

      a vibrational object upon contact

      this slim branch of text lifting the page

      a thread

      at the back

      of the eye

      / hands

      -- looms

      by friction,

      surface entanglement

      stick-lattice --

      -- grass polygon, loosely-packed ferns, a cup, a

      high mud wall --

      for what will you

      the foraged for

      impulse of arrangement . that’s all I have

      that strange, entangled expanse of one’s own interiority

      the ruby-

      throated

      hummingbird

      starts its nest

      with a disk

      of saliva

      moss . lichen

      then, it’s a matter

      of catching webs

      vegetation / silk

      the density of the loops, aerial

      warping

      threaded through the upper

      periphery

      , and then

      wrap another line

      or maybe the plant wool

      that helps seeds disperse

      on the air --

       felting

      a loosely thatched paragraph

      // an open canopy ---

      to land upon an awkward bale of noise

      where I forage feeling into shape

      into sound; where I am exactly

      a subterranean burrow . arboreal nest . clay flask on a granite rock face . the elf owl roosting in an abandoned woodpecker hole . a dome of moss built on a cliff’s ledge . swiftlet catching nesting materials in flight . fungus garden . self-secretion is a narrative editing process . nuthatch . flycatcher . house wren . flicker . the thrush and titmouse . plant fibers and larval silk . sap and pitch . bowers and tools . mandibles to pulp prey and paper . brood cells . hawthorn . cottonwood . mesquite . birch and the birdhouse

      a soft inner lining of grasses ,

      pushed into a mud cup

      the visible line of mud across her breast as she flies

      an entire sentence crossed

      / invisibly ,

      through a braid

      we come to language

      as architects of relation --

      but sentences are not secure

      we take them up as planks

      and make unstable geometries

      a book arrives in threads --

      I am never not writing . I never think : I am not a writer

      some nests can only be reached through a tunnel . the belted kingfisher burrows fifteen feet into a vertical bank near fresh or salt water . the cavity littered with white fish bones and scales

      to spend all that time in the total darkness of the den . the stench of it . the grooved floor of its cavity . to have the instinct to keep everything from caving in

      I want a book that remembers its origins

      I remind myself

      not only beautiful things

      happen in nests

      to write a living-manuscript

      so that as it fails in some of its forms

      it still convulses in its architecture

      a loose heap

      /