J.C. Todd

Readings at the Gender Studies Centre at Vilnius University and at Lithuania's literary and cultural weekly. First solo readings/lectures. Work with Lithuanian translators on completed poems in a series. Support towards travel and accommodations and materials.

When I was a child, my unfinished sister, late at night, was born, mid-morning, died.
Secret, message, Celtic knot.
Who can say whether living or dead descend into darkness, rise into light?
The motion of one toward other apparent
Where sky comes down, sea comes up, the space between
That Buddhist texts term ka, attention poised there... Who?

When two worlds verge, a spark: vowel, rhythm, friction, instant of turbulence. Unbidden, elusive. How to tune to it? My poems poise between the hereness of worlds verging, menisci of tension between withheld and expressed. In recent poems, shaped like blocks I played with, well-defined edges argue with an internal, aural surging that approaches the voice of "the child of solitude," origin, I wonder, of my aesthetic.
 

from WILD LAUREL

IV.
Soon after candletime, when pines
push new tips sunward, late in June,
just as summer shifts from promise
to performance, on the second day
of ruby-throats and laurel bloom,
while camping on a wooded northern face
near the crest of Pinchot Ridge, I woke
to what has become last blood,
a stain like rust on a leafstalk.
Is this how worlds change,
one element transforming another?
How what is rooted, earth-bound
takes to air, borne by spore.

Between my legs a new scent--
chapatti, kavli, bread without yeast,
yet sporish, as if the vigorous mold
of physical decline
had cultivated new growth,
as if something young
had sprung from decay,
like the foxfire, bloodroot,
the shy monkshood
that thrive in the mulch of fallen laurel,
fragrant flourishes of shade.

V.
Shadowy undergrowth
the thigh leads to and from,

sanctum whose gate
the undergrowth conceals,

moon-timed ovaries
that drop into the sanctum

the cell that settles and feeds
and the cell that is expelled,

these and the mind are one,
joined in a biosphere

of memory and fission
whose permeable boundary

is two yards square of skin.
Oh, wild and fleeting

laurel that blossoms and falls,
body that flowers and fades,

Oh, shade.