By Anita Tanner “That which had struck into me my first profound terror, when as a child I lay ill with fever: the Big Thing.” —Rainer Maria Rilke Here the kinship of pain, here the account of your own childhood illnesses, the beast that grows in you with every elevated fever, swelling in …
Tag: Anita Tanner
Beg, Ch, Dc, Yo, Tr, Sc
By Anita Tanner Like Morse Code, the language as rhythmic as water, the hook angles, drawn on the thin yarn line to gather and build, a pooling of pastel color, an acrylic lap, stria of stitches where a part becomes the whole. No matter the signs— filet, shell, cable— fingers fast in form follow …
Departures
By Anita Tanner Some people move away without leaving— when you see them you can’t tell where they are. Others accompany their parting with angry words— you don’t discern the silence inside. You’ve seen them crying in the bedroom behind locked doors or standing at the kitchen sink as if they were present, their …
Advent: Moose in Moonlight
By Anita Tanner Or right-click here to download the audio file: Advent: Moose in Moonlight …he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him there is no beauty that we should desire him. —Isaiah 53:2 …
Virga: The Long Streaks of Grief
By Anita Tanner Or right-click here to download the audio file: Virga: The Long Streaks of Grief Initially it’s a downpour you fear will never stop, but it’s cleansing in the sense that there’s an emptying, and you reach utter bottom where the dregs live. Not that you wear your grief …
Words Matter: Lines Written in a Pew
By Anita Tanner This is how religion kills language: it mounts a thought, drives and whips it to a frenzied destination high on a mountain peak— the ultimate, unquestioned authority of words, unaware how riding wreaks language, bleeds wounds spurred by desire here on the peak of performance. How facile, this peak, …
Kenosis
from the Greek meaning “self-emptying” By Anita Tanner “If you could turn your heart into a cowstall, Christ would be born again on earth.” —Angelius Silestus Old wood, manure, and cattle urine in milky darkness— only one bare bulb at the far end of the barn, each stall cave-dark, heavy brown where cows …
Since 9/11: Poetry
By Anita Tanner I hear them overhead— jets’ Doppler motors, small thunders sucking up sectors of sky. I pause, listening for their reassurance, flight paths going somewhere and returning in crisscross pattern thrumming across the blue beyond. My body vibrates with the faint knocking of photos on the wall, blood pulsing in my temples, …
Poem: Never Trust Anyone Who Doesn’t Limp
By Anita Tanner Lopsided life, designed to make us lame, to rupture our vulnerabilities, teaches us to walk with a halt, turn toward the grave hunchbacked and clubfooted, left eye nearsighted, right eye, far, disproportionately dealt by fate’s slings and arrows— left-handed, right-brained, even our faces are asymmetrical— deviated septa, long crooked noses, men …
Poem: Harrow
By Anita Tanner After the plow’s deep churning comes the spreading work, roots and remnants of years’ crops turned over in the soil. Harrow spikes and teeth begin the fine thin line of mud-caked script read and reread every year until time slows for each foot to meet the corrugated stair of the last …