Eva Hooker

Two poems from Eva Hooker’s Portion

followed by a note on the author

Stilleven (Still Life)

They open
their wings and drink—nectaring

with radiant
skin (& finely fitted),

a sustenance that shakes
outwardly the stem,

picking with their feet
the bloom, this

& repeatedly
(hair pencils within).

Alert to their own frail
need, they set fire

to the follicle, absolve
the aorta (veiling the face).

They still,
even the thickness & boniness & crumble

of light, on
and in—

innermost, beneath the surface of things,
the chosen

bone & fuel
of body,

of fit & bud,
of embellishment & boundary.

I brought back from despair so small
a basket, my love, they wove
it of willow:

Five Monarch Butterflies on Lavender

 

Eva Hooker

 

Tech me that nedeth to wit

And those who are beautiful, who can know them?

The child murmuring as she runs,
keep safe my joy.

Her flowering, then her fading, seem
forms of trespass,

Like the scattering of peony blossoms after a storm.
Their beauty, oddly, drags them to earth.

What then?

What then?

*

When you lift yourself up to the mouth
of another,

What is its proof-text? When Julian asked,
who shall tell me,

Who tech me that nedeth to wit

What need marked her? What desire?
What gave her to say

That God is like a circle whose center point
is everywhere,

Whose circumference is nowhere?

Her language, geometry. Oddly cool.
Her words, backlit and sure.

How do such words arrive
as signature within the body of another

Speaking God?

*

Her gesture holds. Do not turn from this.

In her mouth like honey.

Slowly she brakes her sentence.

A fragmentary of Whom she knows shivering
at dawn.

What then?

What then?

Peony petals—

 

Eva Hooker

 

Stilleven (Still Life) first appeared in Salamander; Tech me that nedeth to wit first appeared in the Taos International Poetry Journal.

Eva Hooker writes: In my first book, Godwit, I traced the migration patterns of a bird, collected wildflowers for semblances, and rooted around in the testimony of women mystics. I like to wander in places strange to me. I like to explore without linguistic obligation. My second manuscript, Portion, leans up out of the shade and explores the compass of the world. I use a long rake, narrow-tined, to explore in Margaret Cavendish’s voice, the invention of a self. I am professor of English and Writer in Residence at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana.