Between Wings by James Long

Title: Between Wings: poems
Poet: James Long
Pub: Lulu.com
Self-Published: Yes
Date Pub.: Aug. 2008
Pages: 78

Categories: Lyric; Blank verse; Love poetry; Syllabic; Narrative; Imagist

TAGS: Long, Between Wings, Lyric, elegy, separation, grief, loss, deep image

From the Author:

The author has been privileged to encounter and study with poets James Wright, John Logan, W.S. Merwin, John Unterecker, Galway Kinnell and others.

The deeply personal lyrics in Between Wings, written over a period of 30 years, reflect those influences, as well as the author’s reading of poets like Rilke, Plath, and the Deep Image poets.

The shadow of a woman presides over the poems — usually in the form of elegy or lament. Taken together, the poems enact the archetypal myth of separation and return in terms of the speaker’s own history…always seeking a state of transcendence-in-union glimpsed and longed for but always remaining just beyond realization — “where the jewel of absolute darkness shines and shines / and all the masters of the light go blind.”

Your Experience Self Publishing:

Lulu.com was relatively easy to use, even when formatting and downloading the whole project yourself, which is free of charge.

Sample Poem:

Twin Sister
(for Jo, in her 6th month)

There is no language of the natural
heart. What we’ve shared is a silence,
though the blood’s voice, the slow love-
throb, sang to us in our sleep.

It has always been you I sleep
with. In the deep silence
of my lover’s hair, it was your heart I heard;
it was your yellow hair my fingers curled upon.

And so there is something still familiar
about this crossed position, the press
of small hands and knees, the slow
rocking together in this dim light.

That first cradle was the one body we shared.

Our language has no word for this.
And this speaking, this
longing grasping at a form,
is still a being of no substance,
the disembodied voice a slight
disturbance
in the unborn air.

§

And so tonight
I see you across five thousand miles
and your moony fullness
seduces me, finally,
back to that whole world
you carry within yourself–
to this new place simply beyond
words–

where thought and speech are stilled
and the body is
the embrace
of two hearts
beating together
in the warm dark.

______________________________

The Colors of Autumn

Dayspring phantom green in the blue dusk
Now all the mothers are under the ground
and the crows gather in the garden of memory

Amber burnished rue moonrise
and the dark trees
loose their leaves into your whiteness

New wheat copper oriental gold
and the bright leaves radiance you never missed
over your hidden face

Clear lake raindrop illusion blue
and the wild geese out of the north your home
circle above your grave

Blue jewel mother of promises
and the steel sky flat over the earth
and as cold in the blue dusk

Snowfall white over the white stone
and your white wing my mother
And the wild geese searching for summer
settle around your grave in the early night