Gridley - Green is the orator

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the College of Arts and Sciences at Case Western Reserve University. Green is the Orator SARAH GRIDLEY

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu . University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England 2010 by The Regents of the University of California For acknowledgments of previous publication, please see page 89. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gridley, Sarah, 1968.

Green is the orator / Sarah Gridley. p. cm. (New California poetry ; 29) ISBN 978-0-520-26241-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-520-26242-3 (pbk. paper) 1. paper) 1.

NaturePoetry. I. Title. PS3607.R525G74 2010
811.6dc22 2009037667 Manufactured in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.481992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). For life- and love-giving mothers, in the biologic and cosmic realizations of the word.

He is hell become heaven, becoming hell; he is evolution, a matter of energy, a star in the dark tomb, a shadow cast by sunlight. He is hell become heaven, becoming hell; he is evolution, a matter of energy, a star in the dark tomb, a shadow cast by sunlight.

He is life that cannot be contained, a holy insurrection, blessed negativity.

About the star-cold abundance of August sand this spell of my two hands working in the dark I liken to the feeling of your two hands working behind me, or your two hands coming before me in the white mirth of bright drapes, white lengths the wind sends in salt-light through the feeling your two hands have in coming to find me. There are things I liken to crossbeams inside of things I call politeness, things I liken to super intendence, seashells, pale hosts of erosions, fadings I liken to insight. There in the window of your soloist house, I think that nothing is holding up this thought that is feeling you moving. In seasoned assertion, the red-winged calling of the grass. From spaces outside the territory, the stone summons, the stone sum.

Weight is a quality known to boundarys swerve. The sum of which is fragile: waves leave mica stuck to skin. Some I know of inherence. Some I have not remembered. Among the lightest of insects, a Comma has a cryptic edge. A woman should behave herself, naturally.

In mica, the glamorous stammer of mirror A woman should behave herself naturally. Bill-tilt, check-call, songspreada bone flute snapped from passage of birdthe unearthed played unearthly.

Once they are there, the bearings are theirs, the sickness peculiar to motion removed by horizons evident flatness. What they bear is the date, and whatever will follow. Bay of gray margins, mobile as curfew. Rollick of tides and empty casements.

Stone-deaf stones marking thoughts out loud. Schist like a book of tempers. Stars in dogged pantomime. Exactly what the waves were for lengthening. Slow, elemental line. Gray like the saint of a put-out fire.

Sea of gray margins, solemn as seals. On it a flash like something wrong. On it the falling quiet. What they touch is the moss like an earthly expense. Green in a poise almost vernacular, almost the sensible guide to North.

My somnolence is the rest of trees (sessile touch around dry leaf to know my weirdest passiveness).

To go the irises the pebbled drive the luminous claps into valley. When you have posted a letter in the open air, an artist will know your feeling, will ground the clouds in canines of noon, gold leaf pressured over graphite sun. To feel outside an envelope unchangeable corner mailbox blue there are words in the morning against the mind, containing sleep in the shape of walking. A nomenclature castle opens to sky: grassy crenellations I may not taste or touch. Chagrin the name between the banks, so many doors down and winded from counting, pronouns in acts of substitution, weirdness in the middle of making promises, where I am in mind for nothing else than to call out, to wander ahead with names to emerge as the last of the wood wind family.

Or simply, drunkDutch courage in the face of milk and flummery our passive margin, our transitional crust, our rift obtusely known as creation. Or simply, drunkDutch courage in the face of milk and flummery our passive margin, our transitional crust, our rift obtusely known as creation.

As it lost its concentration, gold was a million things that wouldnt be dragged from ocean: crass undertaking a reason to form the sun profounding surface the come-loose asterisks of starfish bones.

You paint precipitation following thunder: wands of soaked fire, arcs of sea revising sun, salt come up to seed in clouds, downfallen cool and diagonal water. You paint the garden the garden is: a border blued in in heavy heads, hydrangeas fed aluminum sulfate, a border blued up in amended beds, in old pear peelings and grass. Moon is to the blueness of panicles as seawater is to the whiteness of rain. Hours in this feeling of yours and mine. Viburnums winter fairy globe: in outer robing it is vivid: a cardinal meal in the drifting bright. Viburnums winter fairy globe: in outer robing it is vivid: a cardinal meal in the drifting bright.

As inner movement understood, radiant caverns in the out of sight. Up for the habit of the robust world, the wood boat floating of a starred green loom. Wherever unsteady meets with unsteady, there is the lot of physical forms. And guest and guessed are one to me: whether the sky or whether the lake. I feel before I want to know: water stays fluid below the frost, and silver quiets the jargoned heart. Long in the wild of new-ending winter, the exhumed fletcher could step out showing his armful of arrows

If there is nothing half-assed about the redbud tree, she can be beside it compositionally, in the form of a spring tableau.

See her female receding to a slight power. Coefficient before a vivid variable, amplifying, as will the May wind, a purple of the bark bearing flowers. Was it happening to be there, or coming to act in keeping with ones nature? Who has thought that a soul is a list of things to be done? Far into the color of a scenes exaggeration, the lagoon is reading dreadful words to itself. Looking glass for the apple in flower, for that cost of the sky on its surface.

Draw the curtains for candescence. The antlers were forged by the silversmith.

The sun slips off auroras, illumines branches of extinction. Do you call the main body marker: a standing as if instead of? Or else a thing stooped down upon, and loved? Beneath the tree a childhood coffer, a penny and an acorn smell. I call the main body

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