POETRY MONDAY: January 4, 2015
Gigi Marks
Welcome back, everyone, and Happy New Year!
We have some lovely new poems for you this morning.
Gigi Marks lives in Ithaca, New York. Formerly a professor at Ithaca College, she now works with a range of people, aged 8 to 90 plus, who would like to develop their writing “with craft and authenticity.” Her other interests, she tells us, “are more home-based, with a family who all help to raise gardens, bees, sheep, a couple of goats, and a variety of small mammals.”
Gigi Marks’ poems have appeared in many publications, including American Poets Against the War, Best American Poetry, Green Mountains Review, Poetry, and others. She has published two chapbooks, What We Need (Shortline Editions) and Shelter, winner of the 2010 Coal Hill Review Chapbook Prize. Her full-length collection, Close By (Silverfish Review Press, 2014) was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Recent poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in Poetry.
Here, for your pleasurable reading, are three new poems by Gigi Marks.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
New Year
In those days, so long ago,
I was not yet released from a bad,
first marriage, the dull and constant
clumsy sounds of it, and after an afternoon
spent so close inside, I went out
with my four-year-old son,
the air very cold, his mittened hand
in mine, the new year just beginning,
but this time with a different sense of hope:
nothing happened under the January sun
alongside the clearest revelation;
there was the cold wind blowing
and in my hand the only link
that held me while I would let the other go.
Live Without
Just like cup and bowl and spoon
have that roundness made for holding
so we have formed that shape
again with arms and lap and hands
to hold the things that have needed
the cradle of our bodies. Mine
has the wideness of a chair, a bed,
the sea itself, a vastness that when
it is emptied seems to want some
explanation. And yours asks
the question, too: how does it go,
to live, now, without?
Mushrooms
two plucked after the grass unfroze
from a thick frost. before, each fallen leaf
was rimmed with pearls of ice, sparkling,
and a dull coating on its surface.
the mushrooms are opaque. having stuck
straight up, they are now leaning, first
in hand, then inside. leaning one on the other.
both unblinking. one is brown, one is
whiter than the other. they collapse on the table,
a ragged foot won’t hold them up.
there’s a shadow beneath them.
there are the dark pleated sections
of their undersides, there is an expanse
of smoothness that says nothing.
there is no sound from these soft forms
except a whistle, an exhale, a chirp
while they arrange themselves and settle here.