Litany

By Rebecca Lindenberg


O you gods, you long-limbed animals, you

astride the sea and you unhammocked

in the cyprus grove and you with your hair

full of horses, please. My thoughts have turned

from the savor of plums to the merits

of pity—touch and interrupt me,

chasten me with waking, humble me

for wonder again. Seed god and husk god,

god of the open palm, you know me, you

know my mettle. See, my wrists are small.

O you, with glass-colored wind at your call

and you, whose voice is soft as a turned page,

whose voice unrolls paper, whose voice returns

air to its forms, send me a word for faith

that also means his thrum, his coax and surge

and her soft hollow, please—friend gods, lend me

a word that means what I would ask him for

so when he says: You give it all away,

I can say: I am not sorry. I sing.

Rebecca Lindenberg On Writing Poetry

By Rebecca Lindenberg

"I think there is a general misconception that you write poems because you “have something to say.” I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull that you cannot say. Poetry allows us to hold many related tangential notions in very close orbit around each other at the same time. The “unsayable” thing at the center of the poem becomes visible to the poet and reader in the same way that dark matter becomes visible to the astrophysicist. You can’t see it, but by measure of its effect on the visible, it can become so precise a silhouette you can almost know it."