CONJUNCTIONS:21 Fall 1993
Martine Bellen, Elaine Equi, Melanie Neilson
October:
coldness or virtue --
one long line
2.
First a slump
then a glide.
3.
Quasi dye,
Routine, surprise, pines --
Comeback land.
4.
Forest White
erasure
5.
Traces map
the underpinning,
its allure.
6.
(Canny seen
Thisaway.)
7.
"Egg go home"
Shouts lord as I touch
(you are subtle)
8.
Girl Talk vs.
The Ghost of . . .
9.
leaf by leaf
illusions of choice
work silence
10.
(a) Dangling
Palimpsest
11.
Apple Blue:
answers ripen in
morning light
12.
Lariat
Afternoon
13.
Evening sole
Thrashers without sight
Passerine
14.
Repeating
the password.
15.
Songster once,
this knot up-in-arms
retreating.
16.
Ballistic
metaphrast
17.
Resting in
the chaos of the
Middle Ages.
18.
Eye carving
Catalpa
19.
Trumpery
. . . hid in the attic
or the spy
20.
(im)posing
the center
21.
base and backs
curls, braids, feathers, staged --
portrait self
22.
Enlarged Times
Motion Stance
23.
stutter-step
defies the image/
obstacle
24.
spring in tears
subtle branch
25.
Second chance
Found where it was left
Memory
26.
Enshrined in
behavior.
27.
Blackboard work
summer in reader,
"a pen" picks.
28.
bored walker
widow planke
29.
Crossing the
border that habit
holds us to.
30.
Anecdote
Neck I rote
31.
Fixed stringed sound
Of the surf beating,
Metronome
32.
Sideshow: Ten-
Cents-A-Trance.
33.
Sometimes her
Scorchy face afield
Spectacles
34.
Mutual
Compulsion
35.
Swing in an
ever widening
arc -- far flung
36.
more itself
august suite.
(October 1992-
September 1993)
Note: Renga is a form of Japanese collaborative poetry dating back to the twelfth century. It is made up of linked stanzas of set syllabic structure with a different author responding to the previous stanza.
In this poem the pattern is three lines of 3-5-3, followed by two lines of 3-3. The order of writers is repeated consecutively and is as follows: Martine Bellen, Elaine Equi, Melanie Neilson.