NVN Saturday: TO GEORGE, THROUGH THE ORANGE PLAINS OF SKY and KINTSUGI
Poems by John Linstrom and Chris Reed
TO GEORGE, THROUGH THE ORANGE PLAINS OF SKY
by John Linstrom
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George Winston, a pianist and composer whose unadorned melodies sought to evoke seasonal rhythms of nature and became a signature style of New Age music in the 1980s with popular albums such as Autumn and December, died June 4 in Williamsport, Pa. He was 74. —The Washington Post, June 9, 2023
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Today I heard you’d died. It’s been a strange day. Wildfire smoke swept from Quebec down the Atlantic seaboard and darkened the air of Manhattan where years ago I saw you play a benefit concert with my wife who I was only dating then— a moon hung above the stage where you sat and your fingers stretched over the cold keys pulling forth arpeggiated chords from my memory. Your album December the only thing my mother could listen to when giving birth. Today I wonder what labor falls upon the lands of Canada, the airs of home, while frightful golden plains bridge the continent as thick fallen sky, the smell filtered through spectral masks we kept too ready, and George, I want to know what we will do without you, without your hands and heart, what the land will be without passing through the mystery of your mind.
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John Linstrom’s first book of poetry, To Leave for Our Own Country, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in April 2024. Linstrom is a writer, a Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Inequality at the Climate Museum in New York City, and the Series Editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for Cornell University Press. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Northwest Review, Writers Resist, North American Review, The Christian Century, and Cold Mountain Review. He lives with his wife and baby daughter in Queens.
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by Chris Reed
Kintsugi is the Japanese art or repairing broken pottery
with epoxy mixed with gold dust.
Cracks and repairs are not hidden but highlighted,
imperfections, part of an object’s life.
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Sickly yellow lights the landscape, like a room lit by an aging lampshade. Great smoke plumes from Canadian forests, blanket eastern farms, cities and shores, swallow a line of green glittering trees and a neighbor’s brown house as if the fires are a mile, and not a country away. I taste ash on my tongue, absorb smoke through sinuses, and wonder about the birds, recently migrated north across Lake Erie to nest, On the deck, potted salmon-edged geraniums, smaller blooms of pink and white, and spikes of lavender, sit abjectly in the aberrant light. Rosemary and thyme rub against each other in a blue pot with a gold seam. My sister, the potter who shaped the planter, repaired it in seven days, mixing epoxy and resins with gold dust, painting seams, fitting pieces together, then aging the repaired pot in a large dark box. The trick, she said, is to know that it is even more beautiful repaired. Burnt ash in the air evokes memories of not so distant atrocities and tragedies, yet, seems a hairline fracture in the ongoing dropping of our world. Pillaging of nature, wars of aggression, greed-driven power plays, hate crimes and death-dealing viruses, crack the thin ceramic of creation. Lumpy veins of gold witness our attempted repairs. Is there room on this spiderweb for another seam of gold. And how to start? Epoxies of novenas and pilgrimages don’t work anymore. That god has picked up his play things. And even if we find the gold dust, do we have a shoebox large enough? And will we remember the trick?
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Like others who live near or in the New York City area, Chris Reed was not only concerned about the extreme air quality conditions, but eerily reminded of the empty streets during the first year of Covid, and the indelible images of the air over New York after 9/11. Her poems have appeared in Blue Heron Review, US1 Worksheets, and The New Verse News.