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Darnell Arnoult: Widowhood & New Life
WIDOWHOOD
Peer passed vibrant stalks of rain. Think of his absent face
now uncaught by earth, light among stars. The man
is now stardust. His voice like the riddle of dreams.
Whoever unfailingly loves a cowboy, truly loves him,
steps closer, hand-to-hand and head-to-head, the connection
like home, until falling is the only tangible move.
It waits forward unobstructed amongst the stringy sawgrass
somewhere in the dead of winter, somewhere past the speed of light.
~~~
NEW LIFE
First roped to its surrounding sea,
a child comes out naked and unknown,
swimming to the light and an immortal
piece of shining understanding.
Some strange idling fever of a thought.
Foreign to voice and chattering teeth,
it howls up a strange war garden
of cobbles and blue flowers and dangerous
dogs. A long body of yesterdays—tabled,
tattered, and dying—drops deep into walls
of time and sets into wordless night.
~~~~
Darnell Arnoult is the author of Galaxie Wagon: Poems and What Travels With Us: Poems (LSU Press) and the novel Sufficient Grace (Simon & Schuster) which received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly. Her recent poetry collection, Incantations, was published by Madville Publishing. She lives in North Carolina.
Copyright 2024 Darnell Arnoult.
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“A long body of yesterdays”–💔
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Nice phrase…
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grief and birth both touched by a beautiful array of images. Words working their healing or their generative powers. Fine stuff.
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Thanks, Jim. Darnell creates images that are free-floating, not part of a narrative. The only context is hinted at by her titles, which describe a domain of experience, rather than a particular incident.
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Such a precise and chosen vocabulary in both poems, right? As if considered, weighed, picked & chosen with great care…
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I find the piling up of images exhilarating, especially when read out loud.
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Thank you. Yes, I think fierce is the word I was looking for.
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Of course I love Darnell’s work. Beautiful and fierce.
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Lots of imagination at work here…
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