EDGES
&
FRAY
WESLEYAN POETRY
EDGES
&
FRAY
ON LANGUAGE, PRESENCE, AND (INVISIBLE) ANIMAL ARCHITECTURES
DANIELLE VOGEL
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS / MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown CT 06459
2020 © Danielle Vogel
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Crisis
Typeset in Joanna
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8195-7921-8
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8195-7922-5
5 4 3 2 1
Cover photographs by Danielle Vogel.
CONTENTS
: SLOWNESS, TIME — 87
EDGES
&
FRAY
NOTE TO READER
This book is intentionally structured as a series of filaments. I cast a thought, leave it to begin another fray, and then return. And while I wove the fragments and photographs in a way that can be read linearly, I invite you to lift these poems in any order, consider the roving edge of a nest, and, then, weave them into concordance, into any arrangement that, for you, holds.
/
I begin to create these vessels
foraged for and pressed
into function
a book , of string and filament -- /
a vibrational object upon contact
this slim branch of text lifting the page
a thread
at the back
of the eye
/ hands
-- looms
by friction,
surface entanglement
stick-lattice --
-- grass polygon, loosely-packed ferns, a cup, a
high mud wall --
for what will you
the foraged for
impulse of arrangement . that’s all I have
that strange, entangled expanse of one’s own interiority
the ruby-
throated
hummingbird
starts its nest
with a disk
of saliva
moss . lichen
then, it’s a matter
of catching webs
vegetation / silk
the density of the loops, aerial
warping
threaded through the upper
periphery
, and then
wrap another line
or maybe the plant wool
that helps seeds disperse
on the air --
felting
a loosely thatched paragraph
// an open canopy ---
to land upon an awkward bale of noise
where I forage feeling into shape
into sound; where I am exactly
a subterranean burrow . arboreal nest . clay flask on a granite rock face . the elf owl roosting in an abandoned woodpecker hole . a dome of moss built on a cliff’s ledge . swiftlet catching nesting materials in flight . fungus garden . self-secretion is a narrative editing process . nuthatch . flycatcher . house wren . flicker . the thrush and titmouse . plant fibers and larval silk . sap and pitch . bowers and tools . mandibles to pulp prey and paper . brood cells . hawthorn . cottonwood . mesquite . birch and the birdhouse
a soft inner lining of grasses ,
pushed into a mud cup
the visible line of mud across her breast as she flies
an entire sentence crossed
/ invisibly ,
through a braid
we come to language
as architects of relation --
but sentences are not secure
we take them up as planks
and make unstable geometries
a book arrives in threads --
I am never not writing . I never think : I am not a writer
some nests can only be reached through a tunnel . the belted kingfisher burrows fifteen feet into a vertical bank near fresh or salt water . the cavity littered with white fish bones and scales
to spend all that time in the total darkness of the den . the stench of it . the grooved floor of its cavity . to have the instinct to keep everything from caving in
I want a book that remembers its origins
I remind myself
not only beautiful things
happen in nests
to write a living-manuscript
so that as it fails in some of its forms
it still convulses in its architecture
a loose heap
/