How you can occur in two places at once. How the ocean
alters pale green to light-lost gunmetal. I had no idea this capacity

                                                                  existed, until the sky exposed its huge dry self.
Unobstructed. The sway between rooms. Ballet of tenses.
A decade, a swarm of mayflies, cast skin,
                                                                  light intensity their cue for emergence.
The solar eclipse in totality. Two-minute night. A ring
in the ears. The way we're only one dimension
                                                                               away from time travel. Oh, imagined life.
I slip you over my forearms like ice. The hind leg of a grasshopper
mid-bound. Portals open and shut like riptides.

Shores recede. Sandbars in the mouth. I want to change enough times
                                                                 as to be hardly
                                                                                                recognizable as mammal.
Sweet fin-legged future, with your salt skin and baleen teeth, beat me
against the reef, force a different mode of breathing.
from the book EXCEEDS US / Saturnalia
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I wanted to interrogate time and space. I’d just spent a week in Santa Fe and experienced the big high desert sky. You can be content in your life and still wish for a simultaneous second life, or a third. But we all end up living a dozen versions of ourselves throughout the same life. This poem escalates this concept.

Leah Poole Osowski on "Temporally"
Photograph of Joy Harjo
"Portrait Exhibit of U.S. Poets Coming to Woody Guthrie Center"

"The portraits on display will feature established and emerging contemporary poets, including Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, Nikki Giovanni, X.J. Kennedy, Patricia Smith, Ted Kooser and Joyce Carol Oates."

via TULSA WORLD
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Cover of book Public Abstract
What Sparks Poetry:
Jane Huffman on Language as Form

"In 'The Rest,' I use the repeating language pattern to demonstrate a breakdown from idea into sound, from the recognizable image—a vase of flowers—into something stranger, something that attends to the 'prehistorical, preconceptual and prelinguistic' utterance 'prior to its translation into language-mediated conceptual sense.'"
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