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This one can't fly: he's got
stubby wings, he's old
as space or time; he's gone
to fat. And now he even
disregards the omens that he never
should have learned to read
at all: blistered skies,
the sticky secrets
in the bowels of toads.
He's used up his store
of magic, he's half-blind,
but he's crusty
as good bread and willing:
in the moonlight,
he struggles up the shadows
towards god, hears
the wheezing orchestration
of embodied lives
-- he always sings low
his one hoarse note,
always tumbles down to where
we save him again
and again he falls
like a hailstone
from some heaven
and we will save him.
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Praise
For The
Various Reasons of Light
*
In Renée Ashley’s remarkable new collection, The Various
Reasons of Light , her delicate meditations are lit by the steady - if solitary -
flame of the human spirit. These poems celebrate the most ephemeral aspects of human
desires and aspirations as the volume moves toward what the poet calls, with typical
grace, the profound "generosity of souls". Like a secular prayer book, this
collection illumines our apprehensions of the encroaching dark with the fierce exigencies
of (divine) light; their conflict, if not mortal, is clearly moral. In this wise and
deeply consoling book, every angel grows necessary.
- David St. John
author of Study for the World’s Body
*
Ashley’s The Various Reasons of Light renders the outer provinces of the
spirit world perceptible, and then inviting. These poems shed what was once called
"voice" for something more strange — a tone from the Beyond that
nevertheless captures, in a weightless Rilkean trance, more light.
- Judith Hall
author of Anatomy, Errata |
