Broadside #33 – (Winter 2014 / 14.2)

Broadside #33 (Winter 2014 / 14.2)

Susan Terris

Palm of Wind

Speared like a kite in
a tree, see through leaves.
Don’t hold, let be. A
heart may spar, stop, lose
thrum if the hum
is too hard. So be a toy,
a ploy, a slim slice of day
to slink and slip
its way past owl and
skunk and howl,
a string to sing and be
close and let loose all
rite-wrong-songs.
Just the palm held up
to silk of sky and stun
of sun, and beat, the
beat soft-fleet uncaught
rhyme of wind and
chime of time

~

Author’s commentary: This poem was created in a tiny one room cabin in Maine where I go each year for a week of solitude and writing. This poem was a gift. Sometimes, when a person has time set aside to do nothing but write, words flow and arrange themselves on a page in a way the conscious mind can’t account for them. There were trees and owls and skunks around the cabin, but no kite. The poem that shaped itself is a meditation on a complex relationship. While I was working on “Palm of Wind,” rhyme and the lyric nature of an unfamiliar voice possessed me. I was not myself; yet whoever I’d become I could not control her either.

Susan Terris’s books include The Homelessness of Self, Contrarwise, and Fire Is Favorable to the Dreamer. Her work has appeared in many journals, including The Southern Review, The Journal, and Ploughshares. A poem of hers from Field appeared in Pushcart Prize XXXI. She is the editor of Spillway Magazine and poetry editor of In Posse Review and of Pedestal. In recent years, she has won both the George Bogin Award and the Louis Hammer Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2013, The Ghost of Yesterday: New & Selected Poems was published by Marsh Hawk Press. Her book MEMOS will be published by Omnidawn in 2015. Read more information here.

***