Pattiann Rogers

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Pattiann Rogers has published fourteen books of poetry, two prose books, and a book in collaboration with the Colorado artist Joellyn Duesberry. Rogers is the recipient of two NEA Grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award. Among other awards, her poems have received five Pushcart Prizes, two appearances in Best American Poetry, and five appearances in Best Spiritual Writing. She has taught as a visiting writer at many universities and was Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas from 1993–97. She is the mother of two sons, has three grandsons, and lives with her husband, a retired geophysicist, in Castle Pines.

Poems

The Rites of Passage

The inner cell of each frog egg laid today
In these still open waters is surrounded
By melanin pigment, by a jelly capsule
Acting as cushion to the falling of the surf,
As buffer to the loud crow-calling
Coming from the cleared forests to the north.

At 77 degrees the single cell cleaves in 90 minutes,
Then cleaves again and in five hours forms the hollow
Ball of the blastula. In the dark, 18 hours later,
Even as a shuffle in the grass moves the shadows
On the shore and the stripes of the moon on the sand
Disappear and the sounds of the heron jerk
Across the lake, the growing blastula turns itself
Inside out unassisted and becomes a gut.

What is the source of the tension instigating next
The rudimentary tail and gills, the cobweb of veins?
What is the impetus slowly directing the hard-core
Current right up the scale to that one definite moment
When a fold of cells quivers suddenly for the first time
And someone says loudly "heart," born, beating steadily,
Bearing now in the white water of the moon
The instantaneous distinction of being liable to death?

Above me, the full moon, round and floating deep
In its capsule of sky, never trembles.
In ten thousand years it will never involute
Its white frozen blastula to form a gut,
Will never by a heart be called born.

Think of that part of me wishing tonight to remember
The split-second edge before the beginning,
To remember by a sudden white involution of sight,
By a vision of tension folding itself
Inside clear open waters, by imitating a manipulation
Of cells in a moment of distinction, wishing to remember
The entire language made during that crossing.

Published in The Expectations of Light and Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems, Revised Edition (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2005).

Achieving Perspective

Straight up away from this road,
Away from the fitted particles of frost
Coating the hull of each chick pea,
And the stiff archer bug making its way
In the morning dark, toe hair by toe hair,
Up the stem of the trillium,
Straight up through the sky above this road right now,
The galaxies of the Cygnus A cluster
Are colliding with each other in a massive swarm
Of interpenetrating and exploding catastrophes.
I try to remember that.

And even in the gold and purple pretense
Of evening, I make myself remember
That it would take 40,000 years full of gathering
Into leaf and dropping, full of pulp splitting
And the hard wrinkling of seed, of the rising up
Of wood fibers and the disintegration of forests,
Of this lake disappearing completely in the bodies
Of toad slush and duckweed rock,
40,000 years and the fastest thing we own,
To reach the one star nearest to us.

And when you speak to me like this,
I try to remember that the wood and cement walls
Of this room are being swept away now,
Molecule by molecule, in a slow and steady wind,
And nothing at all separates our bodies
From the vast emptiness expanding, and I know
We are sitting in our chairs
Discoursing in the middle of the blackness of space.

And when you look at me
I try to recall that at this moment
Somewhere millions of miles beyond the dimness
Of the sun, the comet Biela, speeding
In its rocks and ices, is just beginning to enter
The widest arc of its elliptical turn.

Published in The Expectations of Light and Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems, Revised Edition (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2005).

The Significance of Location

The cat has the chance to make the sunlight
Beautiful, to stop it and turn it immediately
Into black fur and motion, to take it
As shifting branch and brown feather
Into the back of the brain forever.

The cardinal has flown the sun in red
Through the oak forest to the lawn.
The finch has caught it in yellow
And taken it among the thorns. By the spider
It has been bound tightly and tied
In an eight-stringed knot.

The sun has been intercepted in its one
Basic state and changed to a million varieties
Of green stick and tassle. It has been broken
Into pieces by glass rings, by mist
Over the river. Its heat
Has been given the board fence for body,
The desert rock for fact. On winter hills
It has been laid down in white like a martyr.

This afternoon we could spread gold scarves
Clear across the field and say in truth,
"Sun you are silk."

Imagine the sun totally isolated,
Its brightness shot in continuous streaks straight out
Into the black, never arrested,
Never once being made light.

Someone should take note
Of how the earth has saved the sun from oblivion.

Published in The Expectations of Light, and Firekeeper, New and Selected Poems, Revised Edition (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2005).

Geocentric

Indecent, self-soiled, bilious
reek of turnip and toadstool
decay, dribbling the black oil
of wilted succulents, the brown
fester of rotting orchids,
in plain view, that stain
of stinkhorn down your front,
that leaking roil of bracket
fungi down your back, you
purple-haired, grainy-fuzzed
smolder of refuse, fathering
fumes and boils and powdery
mildews, enduring the constant
interruption of sink-mire
flatulence, contagious
with ear wax, corn smut,
blister rust, backwash
and graveyard debris, rich
with manure bog and dry-rot
harboring not only egg-addled
garbage and wrinkled lip
of orange-peel mold but also
the clotted breath of overripe
radish and burnt leek, bearing
every dank, malodorous rut
and scarp, all sulphur fissures
and fetid hillside seepages, old,
old, dependable, engendering
forever the stench and stretch
and warm seeth of inevitable
putrefaction, nobody
loves you as I do.

Published in Geocentric and Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems, Revised Edition (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2005).

A Passing

Coyotes passed through the field at the back
of the house last night--coyotes, from midnight
till dawn, hunting, foraging, a mad scavenging,
scaring up pocket gophers, white-breasted mice,
jacktails, voles, the least shrew, catching
a bite at a time.

They were a band, screeching yodeling,
a multi-toned pack. Such yipping and yapping
and jaw clapping, yelping and painful howling,
they had to be skinny, worn, used-up,
a tribe of bedraggled uncles and cousins
on the skids, torn, patched, frenzied
mothers, daughters, furtive pups
and, slinking on the edges, an outcast
coydog or two.

From the way they sounded they must have smelled
like rotted toadstool mash and cow blood
curdled together.

All through the night they ranged and howled,
haranguing, scattering through the bindweed and wild
madder, drawing together again, following
old trails over hillocks, leaving their scat
at the junctions, lifting their legs on split
rocks and witch grass. Through rough-stemmed
and panicled flowers, they nipped
and nosed, their ragged tails dragging
in the camphorweed and nettle dust.

They passed through, all of them, like threads
across a frame, piercing and pulling, twining
and woofing, the warp and the weft. Off-key,
suffering, a racket of abominables
with few prospects, they made it--entering
on one side, departing on the other.
They passed clear through and they vanished
with the morning, alive.

Published in Geocentric and Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems, Revised Edition (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2005).

In Addition to Faith, Hope and Charity

I'm sure there's a god
in favor of drums. Consider
their pervasiveness--the thump,
thump and slide of waves
on a stretched hide of beach,
the rising beat and slap
of their crests against shore
baffles, the rapping of otters
cracking molluscs with stones,
woodpeckers beak-banging, the beaver's
whack of his tail-paddle, the ape
playing the bam of his own chest,
the million tickering rolls
of rain off the flat-leaves
and razor-rims of the forest.

And we know the noise
of our own inventions--snare and kettle,
bongo, conga, big bass, toy tin,
timbales, tambourine, tom-tom.

But the heart must be the most
pervasive drum of all. Imagine
hearing all together every tinny
snare of every heartbeat
in every jumping mouse and harvest
mouse, sagebrush vole and least
shrew living across the paririe;
and add to that cacophony the individual
staccato tickings inside all gnatcatchers,
kingbirds, kestrels, rock doves, pine
warblers crossing, criss-crossing
each other in the sky, the sound
of their beatings overlapping
with the singular hammerings
of the hearts of cougar, coyote,
weasel, badger, pronghorn, the ponderous
bass of the black bear; and on deserts too,
all the knackings, the flutterings
inside wart snakes, whiptails, racers
and sidewinders, earless lizards, cactus
owls; plus the clamors undersea, slow
booming in the breasts of beluga
and bowhead, uniform rappings
in a passing school of cod or bib,
the thidderings of bat rays and needlefish.

Imagine the earth carrying this continuous
din, this multifarious festival of pulsing
thuds, stutters and drummings, wheeling
on and on across the universe.

This must be proof of a power existing
somewhere definitely in favor
of such a racket.

Published in Geocentric and Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems, Revised Edition (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2005).

The Family Is All There Is

Think of those old, enduring connections
found in all flesh--the channeling
wires and threads, vacuoles, granules,
plasma and pods, purple veins, ascending
boles and coral sapwood (sugar-
and light-filled), those common ligaments,
filaments, fibers and canals.

Seminal to all kin also is the open
mouth--in heart urchin and octopus belly,
in catfish, moonfish, forest lily,
and rugosa rose, in thirsty magpie,
wailing cat cub, barker, yodeler,
yawning coati.

And there is a pervasive clasping
common to the clan--the hard nails
of lichen and ivy sucker
on the church wall, the bean tendril
and the taproot, the bolted coupling
of crane flies, the hold of the shearwater
on its morning squid, guanine
to cytosine, adenine to thymine,
fingers around fingers, the grip
of the voice on presence, the grasp
of the self on place.

Remember the same hair on pygmy
dormouse and yellow-necked caterpillar,
covering red baboon, thistle seed
and willow herb? Remember the similar
snorts of warthog, walrus, male moose
and sumo wrestler? Remember the familiar
whinny and shimmer found in river birches,
bay mares and bullfrog tadpoles,
in children playing at shoulder tag
on a summer lawn?

The family--weavers, reachers, winders
and connivers, pumpers, runners, air
and bubble riders, rock-sitters, wave-gliders,
wire-wobblers, soothers, flagellators--all
brothers, sisters, all there is.

Name something else.

Published in Splitting and Binding (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), and Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems, Revised Edition (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2005).

Knot

Watching the close forest this afternoon
and the riverland beyond, I delineate
quail down from the dandelion's shiver
from the blowzy silver of the cobweb
in which both are tangled. I am skillful
at tracing the white egret within the white
branches of the dead willow where it roosts
and at separating the heron's graceful neck
from the leaning stems of the blue-green
lilies surrounding. I know how to unravel
sawgrasses knitted to iris leaves knitted
to sweet vernals. I can unwind sunlight
from the switches of the water in the slough
and divide the grey sumac's hazy hedge
from the hazy grey of the sky, the red vein
of the hibiscus from its red blossom.

All afternoon I part, I isolate, I untie,
I undo, while all the while the oak
shadows, easing forward, slowly ensnare me,
and the calls of the wood peewees catch
and latch in my gestures, and the spicebush
swallowtails weave their attachments
into my attitude, and the damp sedge
fragrances hook and secure, and the swaying
Spanish mosses loop my coming sleep,
and I am marsh-shackled, forest-twined,
even as the new stars, showing now
through the night-spaces of the sweet gum
and beech, squeeze into the dark
bone of my breast, take their perfectly
secured stitches up and down, pull
all of their thousand threads tight
and fasten, fasten.

Published in Splitting and Binding, and Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems, Revised Edition.

Less Than a Whisper Poem

no sound above a nod,
nothing louder than one wilted
thread of sunflower gold dropping
to a lower leaf

nothing more jarringa
than the transparent slide of a raindrop
slicking down the furrow of a mossy
trunk

slightly less audible than the dip
and rock of a kite string lost and snagged
on a limb of oak

no message
more profound than December edging
stiffly through the ice-blue branches
of the solstice

nothing more riotous
than a cold lump of toad watching
like a stone for a wing of diaphanous
light to pass,

as still as a possum’s feint

no message more profane than
three straws of frost-covered grass leaning
together on an empty dune

a quiet more
silent than a locked sacristy at midnight,
more vacant than the void of a secret
rune lost at sea

no sound, not even
a sigh the width of one scale of a white
moth’s wing, not even a hush the length
of a candle’s blink

nothing,
even less than an imagined finger held
to imagined lips

Published in Holy Heathen Rhapsody (London: Penguin Books, 2013).

The Word (Sun After Rain)

A rustling shower passes, and now fiery suns
as small as seeds hang suspended on the point-
tips of every spear of forest pine.
                                                       Galaxies,
I say, and a wraith appears, an actual apparition
of bestowing beside me in the glittering forest.
I know it.
                  Prayer in the shape of the wind rises.
Galaxies fly, a rain of galaxies in motion, a ringing
crescendo of light.
                                Who is it who makes music
with falling stars of water? Who is it who tunes
the art of benevolence?
                                        Is it burning water
that creates rainlight in falling pellets of sun?
Is it sunlight that creates the voice of galactic
rains?
            All of those deaf suns are singing in chorus
together: This is so.