poetry doesn’t make you a better person, and the news that can be found there is like some gone week’s Sunday Times tossed in its clear green wrapper beneath the neighbor’s car. The one who died and no one came to find him, and you didn’t knock on his door when his trashcan of carryout chicken and ribs sat spilling its own kind of news. Maybe. But, oh, to live awhile as marrow in someone else’s bones, to breathe her breath upon the mirror held up to your life, doesn’t it make you want to fling open whatever door you come to, doesn’t it make you want to try?
I love you. I love you more. I love you to the moon and back without at least a whiff of rocket fuel and powdered Tang for the journey. And too, I would have said that Tang would never be in any poem of mine, but there it is. The way my dead mother a lifetime ago plopped the top from a jar of it onto a lidless orange teapot because it fit. The way my husband every morning of our marriage states the moreness of his love with such conviction we were five years in, at least, before it dawned on me the phrase had not originated with him. And dawn without a streak of orange scratched through blueblack sky? Not in my poem. This poem, though, has its own way of saying what it wants to, of taking any old thing and not even trying to make it new. It’s not a competition. My husband says that too, and so I let him win. That’s how much I love you, I say.
The Old French, how well they understood the danger of outside looking in: videre from weid, "to see," at the green root of all wisdom and wit, invidious or otherwise, of twit and video, our kaleidoscopic view. One of the seven deadlies, the ten shall nots. Dante’s purgatorial eyes wired shut. Cain over Abel, the Towers of Babel and Trump—only pride more weights the soul. The evil eye is cast, uneasy, from the head that wears the crown.
Pauletta Hansel’s tenth poetry collection is Will There Also Be Singing? (Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2024), poems of witness and protest. Heartbreak Tree (Madville Publications, 2022) won the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate and 2022 Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County Writer-in-Residence. She leads writing workshops and retreats virtually and in the Greater Cincinnati area and beyond. Visit her website at https://paulettahansel.wordpress.com/.
In 1624, Giovanni Battista Bracelli—an Italian engraver and painter working in Florence—produced an extraordinary book of prints titled Bizzarie di Varie Figure (Oddities of various figures). Its forty-seven plates show a variety of human figures mainly interacting in pairs, their bodily forms composed of a range of objects, mostly abstract—cubes, interlocking rings, and squares—but also such things as rackets, screws, braided hair, and the natural forms of trees. From Public Domain Review.
