Adrienne Chung
First we installed a tall white cabinet
and filled it with books, records, a cracked vase
we found in Crete.
You said you liked things the way
I did. So did I.
Quickly we added a table, chairs, lamps, then a desk, until
we had no more room for a sofa, but I supposed
we weren't sofa people anyway.
You agreed. I took your hand
as we stood on the curb and watched the sky
turn from blue to black.
In that certain light I can see again
all the base configurations we attempted
as we tried to think our way out of this
and then that, one light bulb burning out after another
until it was noon again.
Neither of us knew what to do,
so we sold the cabinet
and bought a sofa. It's been months now
and still the books lie open on the wooden floor,
the pages sailing out like moths
in the dark.
from the book ORGANS OF LITTLE IMPORTANCE / Penguin Books
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I’ve never been to Crete, though a cracked vase did figure prominently in my childhood, its fissure a result of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. My mother moved it to and from every possible place in the house.

The impulse to rearrange reveals through its repetition an insanity, but it also belies a certain optimism—the dim hope that the next arrangement could be the one that finally breaches transfiguration.
 

Adrienne Chung on "Arrangements"
A composite photo of Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore
On Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore's Friendship

"Neither Bishop nor Moore ever broke with people, and both worked hard at friendship. They wrote several letters each day, to friends nearby and half a world away, for their entire lives, and they were constantly on the lookout for books and articles and films and art shows and seashells and details of landscape that might be of interest to their friends and particularly to each other."

via LITHUB
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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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