The shorter lyrics and three long sequences of Moldaw's fourth book attract charged material as a lightning field attracts lightning. In poems about a Lou Reed concert, Turkish ruins, adoption, new motherhood and Walter de Maria's site-specific art installation, the poet moves beneath and beyond narrative with a restless and rewarding insistence. Making and remaking, seeing by degrees and seeing whole, The Lightning Field explores the ultimately mysterious connections between art and life.
from The Lightning Field
lucid/before the shutter shuts/ox bone
tortoise shell/veins on the back of a hand
lightning's return stroke/a calligraphic
radical/incised in ionized air
abrupt illuminant/shape-shifting glyph
revealing/not what I want/but what is
imprinted on the eye/a pseudomorph
ghost weave of disintegrated silk
lozenge-patterned/sawtooth twill/lodged
in the bronze axe/patina it once protected
the fiber purified/the line/distilled
like a thumbprint/secreted in beeswax
a six-week embryo/scanned/on the screen
the ultrasound/grainy as an etch-a-sketch
scanned/then bled out/without/a heartbeat
not what I want/but to accept/what is
to discern caul/ from cowl/cowl/from shroud
the unborn/from the dead/grieving from grief
love/help me brush the cinder from my hair
this morning thunder woke me before dawn
patulous with desire/aching to be
part of the rain/pelting the skylight/part
of lightning's jagged latticework/but what
is rain/or lightning/to me/what could I
listening in bed/possibly be/to the rain
Report
The articulation of my bones
a bird's, I woke not just not knowing
where or who but what I was:
my opened arm a wing in which she rested,
the two of us fuscous and fused
in the feathery half-dark
until that consciousness that's always
roving, testing, that's roving now,
striving to assemble an accurate report,
probed further into the feeling
and found me made of string and straw,
bits of silky floss licked together,
a nest shaped to fit her unfledged shape,
an account of ourselves I accepted
until daylight pried apart the louvers
and I discovered myself fingering
the soft stubbles of her shaven hair.
Appraisal
Five glass hearts to a hoop.
Chinese coins knotted onto brown silk.
Two sterling silver girls skipping gold wire ropes.
Three emerald beryl beads.
A waterfall of three freshwater pearls.
Angelskin coral cabochons.
Milligrain-edged salmon-colored coral briolettes.
Filligreed dangles.
French screwbacks.
A pair of bezel-set mine-cut diamonds, hinge-hooked.
Her mother's mab pearls.
Her father's gold-flecked agate eyes.
Sapphires snipped out of a coat's silk lining.
Emerald-cut glass.
A cracked turquoise heart.
Teardrop pearls, off-round to the eye.
One of the sterling silver girls, dew-tarnished.
His angelskin skin.
Her slippery cabochon.
