Cheryl J. Fish
Unabashed For Martha King
The Poetry Project, our full-service station for
visual verbal musical mobile
Soulful generosity curated, unabashed
Community.
Memories move within enlarged spaces
So many friends gone.
Part of our everything.
Transported by art and arrows: Pages on canvas.
In one issue alone, Project Newsletter 132, Feb/March
1989: Your Giants Play Well in the Drizzle journal.
Basil’s talk, “A Painter’s Bestiary,” featuring poems
written for painters Johns, Warhol
O’Keefe, Tomlin. Workshops by Bernadette Mayer,
Carmen Valle, Murat Nemet-Nejat, Kofi Netambu.
Dance/Poetry collaboration:
Waldman/Kraus, Cooper/Houston-Jones, Elmslie/Almon
Grimsted/Reed/Blank. A Celebration of virtuoso
Miguel Pinero, hosted by M. Algarin, A. Baraka and N. Shange.
Poems by Bill Kushner, Bob Hershon, The Portable Lower
East Side reading, many, many more.
How glorious to recall this magnanimous feast.
How many brilliant lights in lines and shouts.
Memory/pride, hallelujah. Achievements, Martha.
You on the podium of dreams.
Language-arts. Finding jobs
for friends. In tranquility and rain.
Keep it tender as you tend
Sweet life the multivalence of voice.
Median
In the middle of the street
You stand still, buttoned up
In the middle
You wait.
Melting.
Necessarily vague
Winter
When sidewalks empty
Transversing the middle
A treasured memory
tosses, turns
not apart from the window
where a face deflects
the measure of glass.
Truck slams on brakes
minute blast
Somewhere in the farthest lane
Erasing there
to here.
Assembling what you
Made in the middle of
Revising
What habit-forming does
Driving hand-over-hand
attending to the diagram
backwards
walking, waving
in the middle
of the street.
(An earlier version of this poem appeared in
The Newsletter of the Poetry Project #135 Dec/Jan. 1989-90)