ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Philip Matthews is a meditation teacher, writer-artist, and witch whose work roots in ritual and performance. His writing has recently opened to site-specific meditations and ritual practices to support fellow artists. Recent poems have appeared in Prodigal, If You Can Hear This: Poems in Protest of an American Inauguration (Sibling Rivalry Press), and Grimoire. He was a finalist for the 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and a recipient of a 2017 Tending Space Fellowship for Artists, given by the Hemera Foundation. He was a 2016-2017 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and previous to that, the Assistant Curator of Public Projects at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis.
The Priest and Warrior
Priest who washes the blood from my
breast … dove's wing
cloth
that peels a residue
of necessary trauma
from sunlit skin and
eye at his lip whom
Apollo blesses.
Apollo's keen collarbone
installed
in him …
where I place my temple
and wait for his hand
to fall down …
pentecostal,
epileptic,
birdlike … strobic
ride in the pine needles,
tipped tar.
What oracle droning
through his open mouth and my
tongue
receiving. Violet gown
thrown
to the statue's feet. The flower-streaks
there, tubes thrashed
in the night wind, veins like
full-burst lilacs,
kicking,
against slack
blooms impressed
like hanging mouths …
*
On this copper ground: heads bent
to wind … honeybee
doing its work from space
to space where the violet socket
eyes glow and
the violet light cupping
in softened palms. Where ants like
onyx powder … crystallized …
might drink
that sugar unto
coalesced, concentrated. Should I
ask the mind
to be strict in its gaze …
film of easy storm
over ocean and
whale glimmer
like flame in a bull's skull
behind
giant wave … I should ask
what bigness is for when
ground down
into copper dust. How attached
to each particle then
I am.
Wafer
of copper sun arc.
From fan-email to Chani Nicholas, May 13, 2016: "Dear Chani, I'm writing to thank you for this week's video about transiting Mars: truly powerful … Weeks ago, you mentioned the relationship between the warrior and priest archetypes; that the temple would have served as the place for the warrior to be nourished and rejuvenated after battle. The idea struck me and has stayed close to me since." I'd first read the poem aloud around a table of poets at Everest Cafe in St. Louis. We were gathering together the preparatory notes for How to Grieve and Dream at the Same Time, each poet at the table sharing; Bhanu and Aaron and I, in the posture of holding. I felt there, the poem's electricity being received, felt charged by the other works given to the room. At some point, Bhanu squeezed wolf's milk from the yellow flower petals, poured it into Jennifer's hands.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
