VIGIL
Along the side of the house, buds
on the peony, the lilac green and sticky.
In the garden, the magnolia blooms pink,
white, and burgundy.
February's unaccustomed cold revived these,
but stunned the rest. The avocado, brown,
sags against the house. On the trellis,
a thousand dead moths of bougainvilla.
All month, I was up and down
the stairs, my nights
a dialectic of thermometers.
Now January is March. The gardener
hauls away the casualties.
Like small Eurydices, the crocuses,
which this year I turned too late to see,
have gone back into the earth.
I scrutinize my child for illness,
frightening him, scan
the dazed fuchsias for hints of green,
study the resurgence of the lilacs.
Do we risk more when we look
or when we look away?
Susan Kolodny specializes in work with artists and writers. Her previous book, The Captive Muse: On Creativity and Its Inhibition (PsychoSocial Press, 2000) is a study of the psychological obstacles to creative work and the personal qualities and therapeutic work that enable people to surmount these. Kolodny, an urban nature poet, witnessed the devastating Oakland-Berkeley Hills firestorm of 1991, the subject of the title poem of her new collection.
Susan Kolodny
After The Firestorm
Poetry. Paper, Perfect Bound. 62pp.
$13.95 plus S&H
2011, ISBN 978-1-936419-07-4
Susan Kolodny draws on her work as a clinical psychoanalyst in her first collection of poetry, After the Firestorm. Kolodny's evocative style arises from an imagination both sensory and analytical. The poems suggest the unity of love and suffering, and walk a difficult line between the pleasures of the physical world and its dormant, invisible dimensions. Kolodny is a brilliant observer of nature, at once attentive and inquisitive, whose haunting questions provide a starting point for her lyrical investigations into the losses and traumas we all experience.
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