Courtney Bush
After the shrimp festival under bug glow
little moving pieces of light in the pale
light halos responding to my motion
threw rotisserie chicken bones into the
woods that night. The quarter hour alone I
read from the Bible on my phone and thought
is this about me? I went listening, let
words between myself and one who is no
longer in or has not yet entered this world
be few as pure strategy. I was so desperate
for information from outside
the event, like the dark outside the windows
but from outside it was the house that was dark.
In comparing myself to others there was a slippage,
from other bodies to somewhere between
myself and works of art, first a documentary
about a very rare type of mirage. I
was nothing like the mirage and nothing
like the way the men talked about it,
a kind of respectful wonder I doubted I had ever felt.
Then there were the poems I was nothing like.
Kyle reached out having read Ecclesiastes
to his father. I remember you loved
there is a time for casting stones away and a time
for gathering stones together.
From the rectangle of blue light I read all is vanity
all is vanity and a striving after wind and I did
love that but at 90 degrees, sweating
in the middle of the night, my nearly euphoric
fear, how much I didn't know I didn't know,
that one day I would turn around and see
lined up all the things I had done in order to survive
and think what's amazing is not what you did,
not that you did it when you were a little child
but that you did all these sad strange things for me.
from the book I LOVE INFORMATION / Milkweed Editions
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This poem locates itself on the back porch of the house where I lived while I was a teenager in the years after Hurricane Katrina.
 

Courtney Bush on "2008"
Photo courtesy of Diane Seuss and Graywolf Press.
"Diane Seuss on Punk, Plath, and the Poetry of Rage"

"Lorca talks about there being three kinds of spirits of poetry; one is the angel and one is the muse and the third is duende. The duende is the one he believes in as powerful and everlasting, and it’s dark and it drags its wings. Keats called it “negative capability.” It’s the same thing. Over-resolving into hope just doesn’t ring true, at least for me."

via INTERVIEW MAGAZINE
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Cover of Surfacing
What Sparks Poetry:
Emily Tuszynska on "Floodplain"

"Like Shepherd, I too was aware of myself as connected to the world in profound interdependence, an understanding that philosopher and biologist Andreas Weber refers to as 'enlivenment.' Every living thing around me had been animated by the same irresistible force, a 'wordless insistence' to which my body was now yielding, 'bowing / then kneeling / to each contraction as it came.' The force that was driving my daughter into the world was the same force that drove the tulip poplar's leaves to burst from their buds and their winged seeds to root themselves in the soil."
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