December 23, 2009
Ransom Poems Part 2
Another evening’s word doodle with a handful of now-familiar words cut out of the New York Review of Books. Here is the last batch.
Words, a fireplace, a cat, a plate of chocolate cookies, and a telenovela murmuring in the distance. Time to play!
Language lives on surfaces – we are accustomed to finding it on tongues and on paper, but it lives on everything, like lichens.
This poem about love is a lichen on an Uruguayan wool wrap. I love this dove-white wool ruana – a beloved talisman from last year’s wanderings through Uruguay. My friends had friends who had a bottle of homemade limoncello that we drank on a cliff over the ocean as their summer turned to winter. Their baby was learning to wrap its hand around objects. We all watched birds. My Barcelona friends handed me this to wrap up in against the ocean air, and it was filled with constellations of sand. More like fairy dust that did its work on me. Upside down in another hemisphere.
A few moments later, I was technically the same person, but something had shifted inside that altered the trajectory of my life.
I like making these ransom poems within limitations – working within parameters. Finding familiar patterns and being surprised by them, then realizing the new is actually very old. That can be reassuring, too.