Two
poems from Sierra Nelson's Sail Out for Somewhere, Bitter Salt
followed
by a note on the author
First
Pilgrimage
Pilgrim
–
Awake to bells with no melody or reason.
You were given this tongue
and body
and all day long your life rings you,
rings you for what you are
worth,
but you can’t hear it amidst the pound
of traffic, heat, and
senseless shouting.
Sit
down by the fountain
outside the closed church
and listen to water
diffusing
into light.
All
pilgrims’ feet are painted black.
It is good if you’ve lost something
–
your map, your luggage, your companions,
your favorite ring, your
last coin,
your metal heart, your language.
Go
to the marketplace.
Touch everything, pilgrim.
Let every cloth remind you
that
you have hands.
Let
your eyes go blind
on their clever toys and cheap purses.
Pay the toll
to the King of Fleas,
his plastic cane rapping
on the world’s refuse.
In
the heap, find a book of poems
written as if in your heart’s own tongue.
Did
you know you were hungry as this, pilgrim,
here
by the clamor of handmade wind-chimes
and songbirds for a penny? Happy
as
you are, despite everything,
cracking open a seed.
Infinite:
Infinitesimal
Angels are architecture
without
mass –
but
they move, and
with their movements
move
others
(the
planets spin
from one effortless push
of
heaven’s foot).
Meanwhile,
the whole universe
is
falling –
falling
farther apart –
even our moon
grows
more distant
each
year
(though we look up,
look
her in the face
each
day).
So our sins are blown away from us
on
invisible winds –
we
fear
without them we may
lose
ourselves altogether.
Looking
at each other,
you and I hold fast
to
our own dark matter
like
olives to their pits –
nursing our tenuous gravities.
©
Sierra
Nelson earned her BA in English Literature from Vassar College (Poughkeepsie,
NY) and her MFA in Poetry from the University of Washington (Seattle, WA). Her
poem sequence “Translator’s Notes” won the Joan Grayston Prize
in 2002, and her poems have appeared in such journals as Painted Bride Quarterly,
DIAGRAM, Forklift Ohio, Cranky, Louis Liard Magazine
and Swivel. She is the associate editor of the journal Mare Nostrum,
and a founding member of the literary performance troupes The Typing Explosion
and the Vis-à-Vis Society. Based in Seattle, she is currently enjoying
a year-long staff-artist residency at the Vermont Studio Center.
“First
Pilgrimage” first appeared in Mare Nostrum.
