Sarah Anna Paden – Five Poems
Canyon Almanac
Stall of blue fog
Faces off the sun
*
Thoughts, like WIND
The tree will not be still
*
Morning’s soft ridge
Cloud-bent and broken
SUN
*
FOG
Brushes the clear moon canyon
The creek is full
*
Heel to your best intentions
*
Hell to your best intentions
*
Fog passes
Long white petticoat
Wedding on the horizon
From fog, after Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina
From fog
Your footsteps
Wander and stay
Without memory
Home far away
You wade
The paste of day
At your ankles
The night
On your knees
You wished for nothing
And nothing came
Many, tiny
Drops of rain
I write with my seatbelt on,
the day is bold about me.
The damp rises and sways
from these fields,
past my window like no night.
Say, there is time, about to
crest like the sun’s crown;
that bird, and my brow, lift.
If a word comes by an image
to exclaim, I labor with it
and stain my page.
Field composites: I
“The grass stoops not, she treads on it so light.” — Shakespeare
Petals ‘round
poke of pollen
rake of grass
bells, her skirts
she ankles past
Iris-eyed, the earth up-muddles.
Her footprint upon the interstitial
ground
nothing light there but the looking
up
The exterior the aureole the repercussions
one sound one sound one sound
no one
ever
heard
Newborn
livery of light and the glinting of
leaves new green and shelter
your cheeks and eyes
rise proud from the shores of bone
and soften —
like you I am suffused and calmed
with pulsation —
in the looking in you
the world, as it must
before us
in the looking in you
gather song like a seamstress
and sacrifice nothing;
in the looking in you
blooms are beads
and the long-standing pines headdress.
in the looking in you
the mystery of flight lifts the air about us
like a blanket loft —
gold large and
silver shone,
alive after all
with you,
waiting upon me with
consciousness.
Author’s Statement on Beauty
Everyone has a different take on Beauty, which is no doubt the wealth of this journal. When I think of Beauty, it is the energy of form that comes to mind — a certain glimmer at the edges of perception. There is pleasure there, but also true insight, alongside the pride of subjectivity. When I think of Beauty, the idea of exchange comes to mind, something that happens between entities: between the poet and the poem, between the poem and the reader or audience and, thus, between poet and public. This is social aesthetics, born of shared attention and valuation. Subjectivity and intersubjectivity are both within the bounds of Beauty.
Sarah Anna Paden is a musician and poet living with her family in Belmont, CA. She is a graduate of music programs at Smith College and Princeton University. Her work has been featured in Open Minds Quarterly.