NIGHT GARDEN, by L.B. Green

L.B Green's new book of poetry is sheer artistry. Lou is a visual artist and photographer, as well as a poet whose lyricism carries her readers into the heart of the Milky Way itself. Printed in a limited edition of 300, this book is a collector's dream. For more information contact the author at P.O. Box 583, Davidson, NC 28036.



You can see how the night sky spreads out when you open the book!




(L. B. Green)


L. B Green’s poems take me to a new place. An old place. They take me backward and forward, but best of all they take me HERE. Right here to this, not that but this, place where the imagination lives intertwined with the world, both the interior and the exterior landscapes of what we call, for want of a better word, our world. World and word. The world, the flesh of it in image. In language. There is no duality in Lou’s poems. They exist in a universe where everything, as William Wordsworth wrote, is “more deeply intertwined.” Lou Green's photographs are interspersed with her poems below.



Now
History is as light as individual life…

—Milan Kundera

The snow falls
on two lovers. So

entwined their hair
and eyebrows a cloche

of diamonds. They rouse
from sleep. They kiss.

They wade the deep drifts
that lead to mourning.

The plain before them—
for now—

track-bare,
snow-bright, and alert.







Treasure


There is no one
in the swimming pool now,
surface unblemished,
and inviting

as a mirror on the wall, one
into which my blonde boy,
blonde girl disappear, over
and again,

as they jump, and sink,
their small bodies—like boxes
laden with treasure

and thrown over the ship’s rail—to lilt, then settle
in the deep end’s netherworld,
hair flaring and drifting, while

I wait for them to rise—their breath
floating toward me, in perfect o’s,
like pearls on a string.




In the Black and White Ad for the Eau De Parfum

In the black and white ad for the Eau De Parfum
there is rhythm in the tilt of her head, in the animal-
like curve of her neck, where, though holding him
as a lover would, she holds him at a distance. Her hair
long and awash with night and the light of stars.

In the black and white ad for the Eau De Parfum
in the market arena innuendo unfolds
on a silk blouse, on the tawny skin
of youth, his Armani coat, her lips, blown and glossed.
Though his face is turned from view his posture tells you,

in the black and white ad for the Eau De Parfum,
that he is young, beautiful and enchanted. OPEN HERE.
Create your own expression, experience…
nearly a kiss, the one mirrored in the young
woman’s eyes. Eyes large and sleepless,

in the black and white ad for the Eau De Parfum,
intrigue, yet however flirtatious caution.
The designer, worth her fee, knowing all along
what will happen when opening slowly
the carefully folded, scented paper you breathe

the velvety woods and extravagant florals
in the black and white ad for the Eau De Parfum.




Once Again: December, My Father, and Nietzsche


That year each evening my father read Nietzsche,
my father the scholar, my father the farmer: one and the same.


In the front room
after supper: two men who in one circle of light, mull intellect
and chicken-shit, the broken latch
on the barn door, wonder of wonder, the way
my father said reason would at times hurl itself
red flash and dart in spring,
same as the cardinal to the top of the pine.


For hours he read, only to look up, stare through the window,
into the darkness, I wonder now if hoping
to discover each night before morning a place
beyond good and evil, consider how—in the context of his one
life—heaven appears, even smells, he once said: with any luck


wide-open to those like him who were most alive
inside the barn, working with the animals, in that place:
hay-strewn, lantern-lit, flies abundant
and swarming the warm dung, the cow, strapped with the weight
of her unborn, heat from her belly rising in the air, moaning
loudly, frightfully, pushing down, and ready: to calve.



Stone Light


…in the visual patterns of Morocco
for the painter, Sean Scully 1945-


Space: filled with blocks, bars, stripes
and vectors, you enter each construct,
remain distanced from it,
form and color synthesizing things
inherently incapable of synthesis, mental
and physical grip on the world to continually
loosen:


all the while life in its immediacy,
if only, in remote echoes: where light
continues to bathe a garden wall, the hammer
hammers, tea rose trails a trellis, firmness
and fragility: one, and in organized contrasts—
between shape
and pattern—libretti:
of loss, of love, of an awakening: painted fields
that tend to build toe to head, and further,
no rules or guidelines for the seeing:


of a clear and orderly ambiguity, a future history,
the artist notes: All There Is…


…an infinitely complex cathedral of concepts
on shifting foundations, a cathedral built
as if it were on water…



What Is Light Without Shadow?

At dawn the plain, so white with snow
it aims to blind, until, like a bird,

your eyes come to rest on the ancient tree
in the distance, a tree that, bowing, lifts

and cradles you above the staggering
light, as, on the snow, it begins to bleed

its lovely darkness, trunk and limbs omniscient
among the newest angles of one more morning.



The Nests

-after Henri Cole
-for the painter, Barbara Schaff


Because you
have flown as
the bird has
flown
to a yellow-
blended field,
carried in your bill
those wayward
strands of hair, various
blades of grass, the castoff
twine and twig—
like a needle
in the vein,
each nest burns
to the green
beneath the branch’s
gray, where ever so quietly weave
the gestures
drawn carefully,
others randomly, as is
one trail of orange
that levitates.
The nests: your pluck,
your mettle, your blessed blood, your signature:
each nest a world:
a study
on a little square of paper,
each paper the size
of the heart:
as organ: the way
line—glorious, vibrating, miraculous line—in both pain
and joy,
tends and serves.