geode

Susan Barba

• Publisher: Black Sparrow Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781567926019
• eBook ISBN: 9781574232363
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

geode is rich with shining interiors and tactile relationships, delicate human to delicate earth, small delusions of ownership against wider backdrops of loss and time. Poems acting as guides, helping us navigate and remember, create an intricate overlay of worlds, humans and trees.
—Naomi Shihab Nye, New York Times Magazine

Susan Barba's new collection of poems resembles the spheroid stone of its name; when cracked open, a glittering and fascinating crystalline structure is revealed but the stony sphere she offers us, and the beauty within, is nothing less than the earth. With anguish and praise, in the spirit of both the ode and the elegy, Barba considers our time within the larger scale of deep-time. The species decreasing in number and disappeared and the possibility of human extinction haunt this book, while new generations and the possibility of renunciation of our old ways animate it. Here is the world, Barba reminds us, like a ball, in our hands.

y

Dispersal

driving the thruway

back and forth

that time of year

when the twin samaras

spun and sun found

harbor in the leaves

she felt the light slip

the more she strove

°

days ricocheted

from loss to loss

she read

tidal stress : tremor :: swarm : quake

she read

Exxon Mobil plans to Triple Its Bet

on Hottest Shale Field in the U.S.

she drove and drove

she snapped at the small ones

in the back she bracketed

misgiving

she read

Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040

she was not speaking

to her neighbors

who’d razed the forest

next door for sport

she’d hoped for

equanimity

---

time

but there was only heat

°

re. space she wanted

nothing more

than a margin

undisturbed

re. time she wanted

never to accept it—

the trees succumbing

to storms with proper names

the grass succumbing

to polypropylene

she planted protests

but they were numbered

and the mayhem

was innumerable

°

she and I and you

and they and he

seeds

seeking

more than a life

in the wind

Blank Placard Dance

O derelict earth wing

are you the fixer I’ve been

looking for? Gray sleep

and window pane,

greenhouse and lithophyte,

give up your ghost words.

Don’t duplicate mistake,

retain your stony

surface, stony structure.

Defend the palimpsest

that is your face

The Pleistocene Today

Making coffee I’m thinking about the seventies,

about paleolithic emotion, and E. O. Wilson.

His love for Alabama, roll tide roll.

In last night’s rebroadcast of the Strongest Man,

the contestants were docile as the SoCal sun,

like giant purposeful babies in their onesies.

Toddling forward, they pulled trolleys filled

with squealing children, hoisted cages of women

waving, “the girl lift” it was called. We couldn’t

stop watching. The announcer strained to embrace Don

the winner, and Don hugged Lars, the favored runner-up.

How we cheered the golden juggernaut!

As Old as Woe

Here she is again, old charity,

forgotten nearly, cutting back

the excess before frost.

I could tell you about her permanents

in the kitchen, malodor,

her arms against the nickel,

that she drove a Lincoln

with a blinker that raced

like a nervous pulse. Metallic blue

with robin’s egg interior,

like riding in a habit.

Daily I walk past

a scotch plaid lumpen mass

that rose once to a man: Give me

my compensation.

Give me my compensation.

23...

Table of contents

• Praise for Geode
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• (song)
• Earthwards
• x
• y
• z
• I
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author