Susan Rich

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

Polishing Brass

Myra used her housekeeper, Alma Schmidt, as a subject in several of her pictorial photographs of Dutch domestic life. Schmidt wore costumes and posed in a variety of theatrical scenes. No further record of their relationship exists.

No, more a holy meditation
on surface and stain

Madonna with Vessel.

The inland
glow of white shoulders

rivulet of vertebrae

vestige of one breath-
takingly long

and sexual arm
which grasps

the ledge
of the cauldron

as she curves onward.

Remember form:
nothing more

than potent omen ~

pyramid of saucepan top,
overflow

of water bucket, angle of the invisible
skin dimpled

underneath her arranged garment ~

a light-stroked body,
conflicted as rosewater, as clotted cream~

Alma, grace of more
than poor

Our Lady of the Scullery Shimmer ~

starlet of
returning questions

May I serve you?

Perhaps art as polish

gloss of what the photograph

pretends in voyeurism.

An aperture, a flash

of the nakedly conscious eye ~

a part of and apart ~

blessing identity until it blinds us.

Once, on a sunlit afternoon

a maidservant, an ingénue,

swept forward ~

into what this moment you

in Walla Walla, Soho, Barcelona ~

might admire, must revise ~

a woman’s hands: fingernails, blue.

Susan Rich is the author of three collections of poetry, The Alchemist’s Kitchen (2010) named a finalist for the Foreword Prize and the Washington State Book Award, Cures Include Travel (2006), and The Cartographer’s Tongue / Poems of the World (2000) winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry. She has received awards The Times Literary Supplement of London, Peace Corps Writers and the Fulbright Foundation. Recent poems appear in the Harvard Review, New England Review, and The Women’s Review of Books.

“Polishing Brass” is an ekphrastic poem, based on a photo by Myra Albert Wiggins:

Dorothy Trogdon

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

Strange How You Stay

Strange how you may stay in one place—
Say a house facing a stand of alders—
and yet are carried forward,

stay in one place but not in that time,
not in the years that meant so much to you,
that were your happiest years,

how you are helplessly carried onward.

It has come hard to me, this knowledge,
I have had to practice to do it—

to swallow silently the losses while I hold close
what the heart has claimed.

Now the trees have entered their winter silence.
In the garden, one foolhardy yellow rose
Is blooming still.

Dorothy Trogdon has lived on Orcas Island since 1985. Previously she and her family lived in Spokane for 25 years. “Strange How You Stay” is from her first full collection, Tall Woman Looking, published by Blue Begonia Press this month.

Introducing The Far Field

Posted on February 19, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

I’m delighted, as the appointed Washington State Poet Laureate, to begin documenting the width and breadth and vibrancy of our poetry. We may live in the far field “in the corner missed by the mower” (from Roethke’s namesake poem), but Washington is, by any measure, a vital center for poetry in the United States. I look forward to letting our poetry speak for itself here.

You can expect several new poems each week, all by poets who live and write in Washington. I hope this will become a place you visit often for news of the kind you can’t find on the front page. Expect a wide range of concerns and voices and styles. I’ll also plan on occasion to include updates about poetry-related events, some of my experiences traveling all 39 counties, and perhaps a few guest posts.

You may post your responses here, or if you like, contact me at poet@humanities.org with questions or comments or suggestions. Do you have an event or a link to contribute? Please let me know. I will also accept poetry submissions for The Far Field from current Washington State residents. Though I can’t promise you publication here, I look forward to reading your work. Please refer to the “About” section for guidelines.

I want to thank Humanities Washington and the Washington State Arts Commission who sponsor the Washington State Poet Laureate program and who have demonstrated their belief that poetry is a necessary part of a thriving community. I’m proud to live in a state that supports the arts and humanities.

Kathleen Flenniken