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      May 17, 2011The Fuchsia, the Orange, and the DahliasSusan Denning

      for John Ashbery

      We were waiting what seemed like a long time,
      when someone said they thought the sign
      pointing left had been deliberately forged,
      and the route to the city had become untenable.
      The conversation kept returning to science,
      to fields of cows and numbers. Meanwhile
      the days paraded their soft perfume. A neighbor
      pulled a tapestry from the shelf, and we noticed
      how bright the colors were, how the orange
      and fuchsia in the bird’s wings made it seem
      not mythical, but fleeting, and how the dahlias
      woven into the garden held a message of purpose,
      or the signs of a leisure we couldn’t possess.
      It was all we could do not to comment on it
      for hours. Some of us felt strange in the heat,
      as though we could taste the sun in our hair,
      or fold it in our hands like paper. The past
      was to be shunned—if it knocked, we agreed
      not to answer. Such forms of resolve
      kept us incorrigible for days.

      from #26 - Winter 2006

      Susan Denning

      “I came across a quote by Anne Sexton a few years ago that I think sums up how I feel about poetry. She was discussing her difficulties in writing a play, and in comparing it to writing poetry she said, ‘but poetry is my love, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.’ That quote captures how I feel about poetry and my writing of it better than anything else I might say myself.”

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