“Still Life with Narrative Coherence”
Jeanne Obbard
Artist Statement: I appreciate poetry that trusts to strangeness as a way to break open perception. What can a broken poem also in turn break open? You can build culture differently if you can imagine that culture can be built differently. Too often I try to make my poems MEAN. But I prefer to let my poems mean on their own, without my interference.
i.
And it had been one of those nights when you wake at 4am, immediate with an agonizing thought, as if you’d been thinking it while asleep, as if you were always thinking it, all your unconscious and conscious life.
ii.
I saw a woman bending over her husband’s headstone, speaking some words. There were day lilies on the march, bees doing their work. I was struck by the necessity of grief, even among the old.
iii.
Recall when the trees were heavy with starling plums, but it’s too cold for them now. They flock by the coldframes and flatter themselves until they are only smoke. The yellow leaves are everywhere rising from footpaths and overtaking loggias. Here again the winter with his subtle incursions.
Jeanne Obbard lives in the Philadelphia area, where she is a clinical research project manager. A 2001 Leeway Seedling Award recipient, her poetry has appeared in Vinyl, The Moth, and Poetry Daily, and has been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart awards. She is a poetry reader and intermittent essayist for Drunk Monkeys, and can be found on the web at jeanneobbard.com.
Twitter: @JeanneObbard
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