blog of poet, leah umansky

I was a recent recipient of a 1-week poetry scholarship to the Norman Mailer Writing Colony in Provincetown, MA !! See NEWS for more information.

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How to Use the Dead

1.

Invent a contrast – stir shit up.

2.

Milk it.

And dancing (maybe even seduction – a sashay or two?) Maybe even a purring:

please/please/please

3.

Use the supposed. Find what is husbanded in: 

faucets, drains, sills,  the threadbare, handles, footpaths, half-chewed pencils, hardback books, tin forks, the tarnished, diamonds, the spat-on,  the rusted.

                                                            *

Well come on you all –

How does one do this?

There is only so much exploration I want on two feet.

Give me an oar, and a muse or two.

No, make it a siren.

I want me one of them.

© Umansky 2009

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In the Book of Love

When I was a girl I thought that I’d love someone forever, one person, and our love would be stronger than rock. I believed that love conquers all and when I was a girl, I believed in soul-mates, destiny, and fate. I believed in love after death even though some say no:

Freud says “the unconscious.”

Lacan says “the mirror”

Cixous says “just laugh”

Woolf says “a room of one’s own,”

Bronte says “reader, I married him.”

Lawrence was a perv.

Still, I read Wharton and I wanted that crash for Ethan and Mattie. I read Fitzgerald and I wanted those orbed-lanterns to never dim low. When I was a girl, I believed in passion and truth and I believed if I opened my heart like an old fashioned map of the world, love would navigate and steer because as a child I believed in the heart and the way that love is circulatory despite:  perils, crises and death; and as a child I felt love was the steed I would ride out of the suburb and into the book of love where I fed and bathed and made myself this life.

(c) Umansky 2009

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Welcome to I am my own heroine – my poetry blog.

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Winnowing

Let’s say husking, but really its just stringing truthlikes.  Yes, the truth is priceless but what’s given is quickbaked.

I mean, imagine the singular:  the given self:

            Fractured, startling – a genealogy of

            What is lost under the bleak; or what

            is blooming at random. Sometimes, I

            want to stab something good – just

            plunge into a bloom & say:    

“see !”

Okay, the present is not explained.  You may remember the unfalling, but really you plagiarize.

*

The self alone is harboring. No man is an island.  There are two reasons to a life

(a)    exploration

(b)    despair

 & the road not taken is spectacle.

*

A dream: someone scratched open my arm. Forth: blood. Forth: words. Forth: sparrow & flying & lightsounds.  Then, came my heroines.

*

So like a greek play. 

The horror of exposure:                                                           you looked for a door.

found one, and

so it was.

*

Inching forward – admit the impossible: the ungripping of the heart.

The scouring of what you would hold dear to what

                                                            is merely chemical.

Remember:  an oak can’t thrive in a flower –pot.

Yes, this is overgrown,

but, lush, all the same.

We are all gardeners.

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The Used Heart

What is not capered off, not pecked at or pecked-in, not taken down a peg or two

What is not                                                                                             no, never you mind.

The meanest thing next to a pale place in the sky, reckoned or un-so, is you, honey.  

‘Spose the way this all ginghamed – though some might say unseamed  – it’s no longer tucked-in.

Here’s a taunt:  I am still.  

I am still this.

© Umansky 2009

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