#joanna klink

[beguines]

Joanna Klink, from "Aerial", Raptus

[apocryphics]

Joanna Klink

[riverbird]

"Sometimes the call of a bird is so clear it bruises my hands." Joanna Klink, from The Graves

"When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see." Don DeLillo, The Body Artist "A bird is a vessel. It carries a field." Emily Skaja, from It's Impossible to Keep White Moths

[headlightsforever]

Some days I am small beyond measure. Some days I am the fence the field the trees.

Joanna Klink

[adrasteiax]

Today, mid-February where the wind is full of snow that will not fall, (...)

Joanna Klink, from Wonder Of Birds in “Raptus”

[violettesiren]

Into the kitchen a thread of sun floats down quiet. A private sense of absence in my everyday patterns—breath pulled into my ribs prying me apart—and outside the window coated in soot from winds that came all winter, some process has ceased—although birds drop and lift off the roof, aerial sweeps, or just bursts of feather, wings, claws, and the leap of heart I would have, should I be so brightly altered with the chances of life, a reparation I feel gathering in the pitch, scarlet wing, most unnatural sound held in the dim threshold of my throat— or am I less than I was— and fear I can’t distinguish the thin blue current inside the light from the slant in my voice or the early morning fog laid over the grass from the voice that underlies everything.

Day Window by Joanna Klink

[apoemaday]

Porch Swing

by Joanna Klink

And to have come this way for nothing. To see my own skin’s   shallow glow against the cool   wood of the porch swing, holding out my arms.   The breezes I created leaning back into me. I was swinging against the empty day,   against the rain’s copper pitch, against summer. Someone   banged out piano scales   and I swung against them, the lack of silence.   I was a guest in that house, feathering   shapes in my head out of snow,   a quiet above the porch-boards emptying through meadows and rose windows.   Sun fell like mist from an opening   in the clouds above farmlands, the hills   sometimes lifting like waves.   I was host to disappointments that were   not mine. I watched   a few weeds glint in the woods, felt dry lilacs browning, was unseen minister   to stray things that could resist   blurring. Wet leaves against water.   Glass bowls by the high windows. But now these are dreams, they are plain tombs. Why such painstaking care   in sitting on a swing—breathing,   as if I could float back into the precision of myself within the white hours of afternoon, hung   from clean beams by chains   made stiff by rust. Their cold metal links   turning warm in my palms. Have I not changed at all, folding my legs beneath me, bracing for the next unspoken need, the blind demand   to stand and shoulder what I had no   hand in creating. The sound of windchimes beaten gold.   Love is quiet. Something that is   not love barrels over it. But I know who I am,   I know that I live, I can touch   what I’ve lost. The farmhouse is gone,   the people who lived there   have gone. When I trail a wrist   through the air the air feels branched   and altered, the soft wrens   shatterproof. We could have tried   to see one another as separate.

[lunchboxpoems]

TWO TREES

The shuffling of feet, then, was my own, and the leaps of water in a day otherwise listing with rain. Of the mirrors inside my home I asked what is my worth. Overloved, the panes of silver showed me nothing but myself from various angles, touching my cheek, smiling and extinguished. I cannot even mourn what seems to live there. I know another grammar holds me but not together, and I miss looking for it, forget, even, to look. A few carmine clouds just within vision ... some women by the road gathering trash. My life, imperceptible, like bells of heat on skin early in the day, or the smell of eucalyptus I can’t place. I am always unsure. Merely in attendance on the good days. I press my ear to the wooden door and hear something flame in the white filigreed leaves. ___ I felt far from anything that mattered. The routine of a day loses force—you work, clean up and eat, plunging to sleep—what happened to those hours. Those hours were yours and they still pulse with heat and dream, like brown butterflies lifting from dense twigs. Some days I’m nothing more than hearsay, a story read back to me that makes no sense. In front of screens I feel my eyes turn dusty, my grief diffuse. But sometimes when I sense a slight shaking in the magnolia tree I’m the girl staring at something on the lawn her family cannot see, unfolding in layers of air and water, close to everything unspoken—a pause, a stare, a slow movement of hand around a tool. A voice taking time to say Good-bye or No more, the sudden ease of speaking with a neighbor, which was hard the day before. They spoke easily with one another—their lives were words that held in summer air, their thoughts leaden and complex, their answers poor, their need punishing, and huge, while the sidewalks themselves were hot, the stone walls cool, and just before dawn animals scavenged for water in highway ditches, feeling their bones flash inside their own fierce thirst.

JOANNA KLINK

[smakkabagms]

It is possible to love without purpose. It is possible to walk far into another and find only yourself. If there is a right action of the throat, it is to say: I tried, I stayed a long time there.

Joanna Klink

[asraeas]

from "Raptus" by Joanna Klink

[ashtrayfloors]

Rain falls across the avenues. What can I say anymore that might be equal to this sound, some hushed drumming that stays past the gravelly surge of the bus. In the apartment complex a songbird strikes a high glass note above those rushing to work, uneasy under umbrellas. Is it they who are meant, is it me who is meant, my listening, my constant struggle to live on my terms, unexemplary, trying always to refuse anything but the field, the wooden rowboat, veils of wind in the pine. Films of gold in my throat as I say out loud the ancient words that overlay isolation. And yet I miss stillness when it opens, like a lamp in full sunlight. I’m ready to sense the storm before the trees reveal it, their leaves shuffling in thick waves of air. I have said to myself This too is no shelter but perhaps the pitch of quiet is just a loose respite from heat and loss, where despite ourselves the rain makes hazy shapes of our bones. Despite ourselves we fall silent—each needle of rain hits the ground. Whoever stops to listen might hear water folded in the disk of a spine, a river barely move. A bird ticking on a wire. I no longer believe in a singing that keeps anything intact. But in the silence after the raincall that restores, for a moment at least, me to my most partial self. The one content to blur into the dark smoke of rain.

—Joanna Klink, “Rain, First Morning” (POETRY Magazine, Vol. 221, No. 5, February 2023)

[beguines]

Joanna Klink, "Elemental", Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy

[apocryphics]

[animaequitas]

[girlwithlandscape]

“There is no almanac for the living—a pulse flies and then stops. You are pain pinned to muscle— also grasses, breath, tree-dawns, and gears. You are dark arteries of quiet, the white heat smashed through deserts and levers and coasts— that flickering pause between thoughts. More even than your own life, you flow from what is. The stars swept into stillness, the ground drinking rain. You are the whole shape of sound. Whether or not you sing.”

— Joanna Klink, The Nightfields

[woundgallery]

Joanna Klink