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    Crossing Over: Poems
    Crossing Over: Poems
    Crossing Over: Poems
    Ebook78 pages24 minutes

    Crossing Over: Poems

    By Priscilla Long

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    About this ebook

    Long’s work begs to be read aloud in order to savor the rich language and rhythm she instills in each poem. She explores the beauty of specific bridges while employing them as a metaphor for crossings to death (a sister’s suicide), eros, and art. Part elegy, the book also explores living, remembering, and celebrating.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of New Mexico Press
    Release dateJul 15, 2015
    ISBN9780826337061
    Crossing Over: Poems
    Author

    Priscilla Long

    PRISCILLA LONG is a Seattle-based writer, writing teacher, and editor. She is the author of Crossing Over: Poems, The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life, and Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry.

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      Book preview

      Crossing Over - Priscilla Long

      cover.jpg

      Crossing Over

      seriestitle

      © 2015 by Priscilla Long

      All rights reserved. Published 2015

      Printed in the United States of America

      20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5 6

      The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

      Long, Priscilla.

      [Poems. Selections]

      Crossing over : poems / Priscilla Long.

      pages cm. — (Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series)

      Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN 978-0-8263-2396-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8263-3706-1 (electronic)

      I. Title.

      PS3612.O5243A6 2015

      811’.6—dc23

      2014036088

      Cover illustration: Murray Morgan and Downtown,

      photograph courtesy of Scott Hingst

      Author photograph courtesy of Tony Ober

      Cover designed by Felicia Cedillos

      The self must be a bridge, not a pit.

      —Theodore Roethke

      1. Memory’s Load

      Sister Ghost

      Your beauty stuns, but

      it’s static, photographic.

      Your stories stir the dust,

      stick to the broom.

      Your drawings dream

      your fine-stitched quilt.

      Your death—your gift

      of stones to us. No blame.

      Suicides are deranged

      with despair. Oh Susanne.

      Were there a bridge back to you,

      I would take it anywhere.

      Queen of the Cut

      Cable-stayed bridge, Tacoma, Washington

      Night-gem, sun-brooch, sky-jewel.

      A phantom ship—tall-masted, cable-rigged.

      Kandinsky bird in blue air.

      Spare. Neat as a girl-queen

      above the cut. Tacoma’s quarrel

      with rust and rotten brick.

      She reigns, angles of gleams,

      smoke-daughter, penumbra

      of Mount Tacoma. Snow-peaks

      dream her tides, her white piers.

      She wends her wheel-trail

      through ribbons of light and steel.

      Note: In Pacific Northwest nomenclature a cut is a canal.

      Psalm to Stones

      You set me down

      in a desert of stones,

      you crowned me

      Queen of Stones,

      and so I praise

      cold stones, broken

      off the mother-rock,

      windswept to orphan shores.

      I praise stone caverns,

      bat-ridden and dark,

      black basalt

      worn smooth as skin.

      I praise the bellystone

      of Buddha, the burn

      of Buddha’s breath.

      I praise your

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