Phillip Barron and Jane Gregory
Monday, March 28 at 7:30 PM
Sacramento Poetry Center at 1719 25th Street
Host: Tim Kahl
Phillip Barron’s first book of poetry, What Comes from a Thing, won the 2015 Michael Rubin Book Award and was published by Fourteen Hills Press. Elsewhere, his writing appears in New American Writing, Brooklyn Rail, Janus Head, Orion, Saw Palm, and Radical Philosophy Review. He is the Poetry Reviews Editor for Sophia and Philosophia, the founding editor of OccuPoetry, and was the Editor of Squaw Valley Review for its 2012 issue.
The Scarecrow
Phillip Barron
Sunlight scatters in place
of what was a road, which
like the rows beside it
harrowed from the dirt,
held tight the shape of desire
to make the land a means,
each row less formed
until the last dark shape
lessens into light cast wide
by fog.
In one of the rows stands a man,
stuffed and still. One must be
still to see the scarecrow,
to wait for heat and wind to part
water suspended in cumulus.
Though fog breaks
morning’s promise
of field mice and hare
to the northern harrier,
discloses winter’s debt
in green shoots brighter
than the sun itself,
and holds itself to the thought
there is no consequence,
there is only permission,
the fog is not a reason
to think the scarecrow
minds the fog,
it is only a straw man.
Originally published in New American Writing
Jane Gregory is from Tucson, Arizona and now lives in Berkeley, California. Her first book, My Enemies, was published by the Song Cave in 2013. She is currently pursuing her doctorate in the English department at UC Berkeley, where she co-curates the Holloway Series in Poetry.
ACTION IS CONTENT AND CONTENT WITHOUT ANY ACTION IS DESIRE
There is a flashing forth by which
I enter your heart and instruct you: get me
to the brouhaha, the cry of
the devil in the cloth of the clergy,
the hubbub, bubba, go, scum
up the wildredness
and then you will see some of the light lifht
in the grass the moss was in the clover of
what everything is but m[in]e, dug
under the little I cannot instrument
, man, I have imperceptible knowledge
a lot, zuys, and work very little
all of the time so that your desire is strong
as it should be to call attention to the title’s
own: to unhurt with, be smart about, and
redact, while healing what makes you make them, your faces.
