Molly Brodak
 
Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens,
and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.

Gen. 7:2
 

I am not sure
of what I guard.
It feels molten.

Some years
were just rain,

millions,
something raining
something,
& a sun, a star,
a principle pointed down
with no munificence
behind the rain;

films of bacteria
crept up rocks.

See pigs trot up the chute
sunny, all hairy shoulders, like fatty human torsos on hoofed pegs.

Woman is an animal.
Man is a way of not being a woman.

Even in a myth or a million years ago
there are almost no onenesses.

One is the sky:
it is flocked and deaf and only blue and blue.

Man mule and woman mule
drown, orderly and opposite.

The one sinking fast
sung first. Mud for an oven.

With a voice addled with voices.
With a trunk cleft like a hoof.

Words like fronds,
brushing me in. Then a man
awakes into a body.

Because someone left
the water and lived?

And how am I made
to not understand?
Tubes of blood
in a buffeting nimbus,
a whole planet, a lantern
of a planet, and its
gene for slow wind,

pools of overgrowth,
a mammal’s white belly,
his hands on a sidewalk

for seconds, or
centuries ahead
under crushing wideness

where a small book
glued up
underfoot.

A planet blinks ice on & off.
This is not darkness.

Snow mounds
like a month.

There is the void I guard.
You describe it & I describe it.

Half of me feels strangled,
a curve in a dirt road. I can’t see ahead.

Up to the trees’ necks, a rushing sound,
and my particular birthplace is now fluid.

Fluid again, I mean. Dark fluid. How a hill cut showed raw
quartz veins, once white fluid, now wet in sun, teeth in a laugh.

You are not a descendant of a woman
who never gave birth.
There are no men but in instances.

Snail both man and wife,
thought itself into half stone.

No women but in sheaves and sheaves of straining blood,
sharp mournful sun alone like a oneness, but isn’t.

We haunt
the remote.

That word, we,
now I hold my hand over like a fire.
from the journal THE VOLTA
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"In Memory of Jean Valentine"

“Looking into a Jean Valentine poem is like looking into a lake: you can see your own outline, and the shapes of the upper world, reflected among rocks, underwater life, glint of lost bottles, drifted leaves. The known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where consciousness and the subliminal meet."
 
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Mónica de la Torre on "Variation I"

"Take, for example, the 'verdura' rhyming with 'segura' in the Camões, which in the translations I’ve already written appears as verdure, greenery, and lushness depending on what the variation in question most needs. Hatherly does this herself throughout when she uses a range of synonyms, and interestingly also thought of her reinterpretation of traditional texts as an act of translation that has the effect of altering the original."
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