Poetry / Kasey Jueds
:: Second Silence ::
Look up between the winter and a goneness, refusing what snow permitted songbirds to understand. You were your own ghost, surging through a closed throat, faithful to these maples until snow knotted deeper the window, the sky. How you scattered inside the angel’s hands, inside the birds: a letter unsent, shriven in the face of the cold to come, covered by Later in her perfect meadow of milk. That freezing place arrives coiled through a second silence, left to the docile animal alone.
:: Leafless ultramarine, winter envelope ::
slipped beneath the wrists’ translucent skin. Unknow birds where cold works to soften a name, where the woods, insistent, describe ghosts, this exact failing. Since there is a tree, there is this wind blotting the lamp-struck dusk, the empty teacup’s pink-flowered cracks. Swathes of black, pinned to mountains, mix vanishing with the shapes of pines. To sunder means to inhabit corners, a single streetlight sometimes covered with snow.
From the writer
:: Account ::
I’ve been trying to write even a portion of my love for the Welsh artist Gwen John, and her paintings, for decades. I did make one poem for her, 25 years ago, a poem I liked and kept. And then, nothing. Or: some attempts, all of which felt lifeless, flat. I gave up, though I continued to think and read about her, to visit her paintings when I could. Then this past February I took a class with the luminous poet/teacher Molly Schaeffer, and one week Kylie Gellatly was a guest. Kylie talked us through—so generously—her process of making collage poems. I had tried collage before and didn’t take to it (though I love scissors and glue sticks). But this time, cutting my old failed poems into individual words and shifting them around on a blank page, I felt a burst of newness and energy.
These two poems, to and for Gwen John, feel, in a sideways, surprising-to-me way, so much more to and for her than any of my other attempts over the years. I remember my Buddhist teacher saying to me once, “Something is always happening”—probably in response to my complaining that nothing was happening in my practice or my life. In the same way, something was happening during that empty-seeming time, the years I was discouraged and feeling far-from, giving up and starting again, trying to write toward Gwen John
Kasey Jueds is the author of two collections of poetry, both from the University of Pittsburgh Press: Keeper, which won the 2012 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and The Thicket. She lives on ancestral Lenape land in a small town in the mountains of New York State.