Like Earth we're "beatified now by a thing / borne in the dust"

Everything is what it is but fortunately for artists, the opposite is equally true. Nothing is what it is or everything is a bit of this and that and nothing contains multitudes same as everything; or it doesn't.

What am I even talking about?

A poem. The "Garden of Sex" by Jeanne Larsen. It's from Why We Make Gardens, which I reviewed for The Rumpus earlier this year.

Here the earth is a sweet lover, the skin has "windowed leaves" and surrender is a thing, a being, a presence. It's wise, surrender, in knowing "it too will be fed."


The Garden of Sex

This earth is sown
with salt. And it blossoms

wholly, beatified now by a thing
borne in the dust, undeniable,

tender. Its stark
rain still intimates.

It soothes and insists
that it never will stop. Why,

of course this ground trembles,
relentless. This wild garden grips

the stem of the brain. It
yields up the soft

blood's opaque, wet, spent
fruits. It looks out

past your skin's windowed
leaves. At the downpour’s

warm eye, this breathing terrain
simply swells. Rhizomes spread out,

eager and curiously calm.
What holds them's no more

than surrender that knows
it too will be fed.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeanne Larsen, Why We Make Gardens (Other Other Poems), Mayapple Press, 2011.

When Herman Melville & Emily Dickinson Made Whoopee (on a prairie on the high seas)

First of all, due to circumstances beyond my control, such as fulltime work and wifi-connection issues at home, I have had to stuff the 3000 Loving feature "Foodstuff Friday" in the freezer. My freezer, known as "back burner" to some, is commodius and durable, so no worry there. 

Secondly, if Emily and Herman were to trample gender-inclination expectations (she being thought to veer toward the ladies and he toward the men, though the Kinsey scale is merely a scale and many of us are all over it), they well could have produced me.  (And I would be, and am, a production.) 
I just read Elizabeth Hardwick's beautifully written short biography of Melville, entitled, I believe, Herman Melville. His inclination to ponder the immortal was reinforced (should Moby-Dick and friends not settle the issue) by the following quotation she offered from Hawthorne's diairy.  Please note that I found the quotation online at the blog Hawthorne in Salem.

Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated"; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists-and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before-in wandering to-and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us (Eng NB, Vol II, 163).

Emily Dickinson ("Ma" to me) has reiterated her interest in Eternity and other malefactors not infrequently and so, when dashing off a bio statement for a book review of We Make Gardens by Jeanne Larsen, I wrote the following:

Sarah Sarai is the love child of Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, who both thought frequently about death and its accoutrement and were each their own person. Her BlazeVOX-published collection, The Future Is Happy, was released in 2009. Loose Gravel Press will publish her chapbook later this year. Her poems are in (or soon will be in) reviews including Threepenny, Mississippi, Minnesota, Eleven Eleven, Pank, Boston, Gargoyle, POOL and Parthenon West. She has taught and does in fact hold an MFA (in fiction) from Sarah Lawrence College, (stories in ragazine.cc, South Dakota Review, Storyglossia, Stone’s Throw, Tampa Review, VerbSap, Weber Studies and more) but earns her living copyediting in ad agencies.

Well, you get the idea. I gotta copyedit (which is two words but I don't care). The picture is serendipity, pure serndipity.  I googled Mellville and Dickinson and not only found an image but it is attributed to Ron Silliman.  Providence is mine.