Some Street Cries (excerpt)
4.I think I shall end by not feeling lonesomeonly scoured by the lengthy light of everyone.Nice, fine milk, the best of all milk.Balancing the persuasive long poleof friendship on a stone,I think I shall end by not feeling lonesome.I have lived and eaten simply.I have leaned against the shape of handsome choices.The almanac conceals a pasture you would like.The universe is cast in consequences.Draw my name in milk on canvas.I doubt I shall and by not feeling lonesome,But this is outrageous:Come buy my ground ivy, come buy my water cresses.The ink is wrong, but a battered almanac is not a heartless almanac.But is it time to combine and speak out?The day gazes helplessly at time.I think I shall end by not feeling lonesome,The pamphlets yellow, the milk also: the milk, the fine milk.
Feature Date
- December 2, 2019
Series
- What Sparks Poetry
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Copyright © 1991 by Marjorie Welish
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
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Marjorie Welish is the author of The Annotated “Here” and Selected Poems, Word Group, Isle of the Signatories, and In the Futurity Lounge / Asylum for Indeterminacy, all from Coffee House Press. The papers delivered at a conference on her writing and art held at the University of Pennsylvania were published in the book Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish (Slought Books). In 2009, Granary Books published Oaths? Questions?, a collaborative artists’ book by Marjorie Welish and James Siena which was the subject of a special exhibition at Denison University Museum, Granville, Ohio, and part of a two-year tour of artists’ books throughout the United States.
Her honors include the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Fellowship from Brown University, the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Poetry Fellowship at Cambridge University, and two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
She has held a Senior Fulbright Fellowship, which has taken her to the University of Frankfurt and to the Edinburgh College of Art. She is now Madelon Leventhal Rand Distinguished Lecturer in Literature at Brooklyn College.
Providence, Rhode Island
"The Windows Flew Open is a collection long anticipated and now beautifully realized. It explores the inner landscapes of psyche and dream, but also the surface tensions and contradictory currents of the world before us. If, adrift on this flow or flaw, we are actually to go somewhere, as I think we must, then here are the words of the speaking boat, whose sail is a tongue."
—Michael Palmer
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