This is another portrait of the Mother of Nine. I haven't seen her now for a couple of days,
but I know she is still protecting her brood.
I have been looking at a collection of mini-essays by poets on "the line" called A Broken Thing; poets on the line, edited by Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee and published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. It is a splendid idea for a book, but I haven't read enough in it yet to see how useful it might be to most of us. The epigraph to the book is from Kora in Hell by William Carlos Williams, a book I have rarely been tempted to pick up, much less actually read. But this is so great that it is tonight's poem, all by itself. I hope it has eight brothers and sisters, like the turkey family, and will have to go looking for them. It is on Kindle for 99 cents.
Thus a poem is tough by no quality it borrows from a logical recital of events, nor from the events themselves but solely from that attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken things into a dance giving them thus a full being.
William Carlos Williams, from Kora in Hell.
Notice that there isn't any punctuation, and that that makes one work just a little bit harder. Is that a good thing? A bad thing?
Always watchful, the Mother of Nine!
I watched a documentary about a man who followed a wild turkey family around for a year and filmed them. They are a lot more interesting than I ever gave them credit for.
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