What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our fourth series, Object Lessons, poets meditate on the magical journey from object to poem via one of their own poems. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay. 
Susan Tichy
As rock speaks to any
trained or curious eye:

someone else
sometime else

laid down words—
thin sheets or thick—

something broke them
lifted, pressed them

here: each rippled sand
each pebble clenched:
 
motion rendered
visible, in red boulders
 
thick with clasts, a wild
conglomerate, something made
 
of other things where
‘pain and suffering shape
 
the mind,’ a quite implausible
‘up above’ where wind hammers
 
worlds together: convenient
and bleak
 
reduced to brash or
lichen crust as brute matter
 
wind/light/space
a mystery thick
 
as contour lines on an old map
—called reticent
 
or maybe clitched, or
‘looking back down
 
the path to the sea’
—I meant seabed
 
a fossil storm just
part way up
 
to paradise—look here:
a shallow dip in rough scree
 
‘where water comes gradually
into focus’ only because
 
it trembles: that is wind
speaking softly
 
heard by those who carry pain
as others carry
 
talismans, a descendental
willingness
 
to walk all day in pursuit
of fear—I mean
 
to corner it, trap it, parse it
thumbing a rock
 
of green/black waves
touching light
 
in the form of leaf
time in a metamorphic
 
stone: ‘and who
with any sense
 
can’t be interested
in that?’—the sheen
 
the shades, the Gates
of Delirium—

sandstone, sandwort
iron oxide
 
thought or spasm
touch or word:
 
where a breeze
crosses pain flutters
 
muscle, ligament
sediment, sentiment
 
trees bent flat
by wind and snow
 
skirling waves
of rock uplifting:
 
try to stand there
try to find
 
a there exactly
touching here
 
a timberline
so crystal clear
 
so free of pity
free of dread
 
and all the lakes
that live there still
 
as wind
from the book THE AVALANCHE PATH IN SUMMER / Ahsahta Press
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Cover of Susan Tichy's book, The Avalanche Path in Summer
What Sparks Poetry:
Susan Tichy on "In Country That Is Rough, But Not Difficult, One Sees Where One Is & Where One Is Going at the Same Time"

"My home mountain range, the Colorado Sangre de Cristo, is an 80-mile fault-block uplift, with ten summits over 14,000 feet....Walking there for the last forty years has helped me learn that place is neither fixed nor purely spatial, but temporary and temporal, contingent and unstable, an intersection of forces I happen to encounter (and take part in) during my brief time on earth and briefer time as walker through a landscape. Here & now is a knot, and all its strands are moving."
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Edward McGuire's 1973 oil portrait of Seamus Heaney
"The Humble Confidence of Seamus Heaney"

"Fame came to him young, but when necessary, Heaney practiced evasiveness, like the outlaws on the run who regularly inhabit his work, or the mad King Sweeney of Irish legend, condemned to live the life of a migrant bird, whom he chose as an alter ego."
 
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