The Apostrophe Blog
My cento, “On Not Looking Away,” is appearing in the print issue of Fence 42, Winter 2025 and on their website, here:
On Not Looking Away: A Cento
Today I saw a woman wrapped in rags
gathering fuel in vacant lots.
The light became her grace and dwelt among
the clean bones crying in the flesh.
Notice the convulsed orange inch of moon,
the whole length of a stem,
the willow shining,
embarrassed into an uncertain smile.
No water is still on top;
a sun in this wash would run and fade on the sky.
What face, in the water,
sang unmeaning down the stream?
Today I saw a woman wrapped in rags
with alarmed and startled eyes,
thin in the throat and the time not come for death,
dipping the stream once more.
So be the angels blinded in her new holiness.
A cento created of alternating first and last lines of poems in The Voice That Is Great within Us, edited by Hayden Carruth. These seventeen lines are by the following poets: James Wright; T.S. Eliot; Ezra Pound; Elinor Wylie; H.D. (Hilda Doolittle); e.e. cummings; Adrienne Rich; Henry Rago; Paul Goodman; James Dickey; Patricia Low; William Carlos Williams; Ivor Winters; James Wright; Jim Harrison; Archibald MacLeish; Louise Bogan; and Kenneth Patchen.
The public domain image above of the painting, “Woman Washing by a Stream,” by Narcisse Virgilio Díaz de la Peña.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
- Writing in Form: A Cento Published in Fence - April 2, 2025
- “We don’t want your Nazi cars / take a one-way trip to Mars.” - March 30, 2025
- Publication in Fence, Winter 2025 - March 22, 2025
