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Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 23.2 (2002) 152-153



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Horizon

Elizabeth Woody


Horizon,
palm to palm, exposure f/64, tonal shades on glass plates.
Long exposure. This will continue. Pause.
The kissing mists tongue and teeth.
Arcing neck is a bridge. Repetitious hands move lengths of hair,
back, smooth hips, shape pose.
Inside the orange meat of a yam is pale yellow.
It falls apart in its own juices.
The old hot plate, a blackened porcelain cube.
Music of any empty transistor radio, round dial frozen.
The eternal wop-wop of the center,
unrecognized flexible spine shivers with vibration, the eyes and the Eyes,
swaying ache of muscle.
Clumsiness is to tear apart coherence.
Peaceful, skin sounds in the grooves that play digital.
The hips continue in parting.
Spirals are for centrifuge.
It is no longer light. The dark recognizable
as a chamber of throat and chest.
Inside, a child in the lap space of happiness
hears music. It is more.
It is the shaking interior of seeds.
Interior of flowers. The legs are crossbones
and creation mixing. Mirror.
A thin black pane between perception and flesh.
We are the sweet sweep of eyelashes.
We are more than water purged of anger. [End Page 152]
Belly sinks into another belly.
White water movement of glacier-aged
water, rock resists and then moves
away in the washout currents. The image is in silt.
Inside dream as Dream, spine balances, loses center.
In the ears, in wind, water, all sounds level.
Presence changed into a canopy of noise
Over the tangle, the dense rain affect
Of noise, noise, noise. Hands groping
lost ground. Feet brace the perimeters of corona.
Skin over the aural heartbeat without the organ.
Shell without the pressure of growth.
On the tip of mountains there is a cold white light.
The dips are waterfalls. The sun, a warm rise of crown.
Of halos and the reach of ankles, the trees emanate sound.
Covering is a small event, unzipped and locking teeth,
buttonless and sewing on shells, layered with opulent pearls.
Inside taste is a dark definition of light.
The drum is the garment for speech.
Intoxicated on the breath. No breath on collapsing.
Breath in explosion.
Hands roll away like aspen leaves, all color,
still, only captured light.
The power of synchronous heat welds loosened complexity.
The body expands, has unfolded itself from a rusted trunk.
It does not cull shame. Absorbs several values, the original
caul of luck, without its face and extremities
overwhelmed, claimed by crystal apertures.
The rise, a nose, breasts, or the knee laying
over the other knees, hand on waist.


 

Elizabeth Woody (Navajo/Warm Springs/Wasco/Yakama) has published poetry, short fiction, essays, three books, and is a visual artist. Woody has received the American Book Award, Hedgebrook's J. T. Stewart award (for those who write transformational work), the William Stafford Memorial Award for Poetry from the Pacific Northwest Bookseller's Association in 1995, and she was a finalist in the poetry category for the Oregon Book Awards for 1994. Please see http://www.hanksville.org/storytellers/ewoodyfor a complete list of publications.

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