Veronica Patterson

 

What It Hinges On                                                                        [note]

 

                        The white birds swirl above the water, pearls in a jar of airy oil, their name full of Ls.

                        When she touches them: satin. When she smells her hand: sugared almonds. On her tongue:

foam at the base of the waterfall.

                        Did she ever visit the Lake Country? She grew there. Did she drown in the water music that

filled the chambers of her heart?

                        The birds were not pearls, but tiny hinged shells, bivalved, though not as the heart is valved.

                        Were they as beautiful as the full moon last night? someone asked. Not as loud, she answered,

because the oil quieted the hinges.

                        That gold and sapphire vision has a specific meaning, someone said to her, “but I can’t tell you

yet.”

                        Meanwhile, she was quicksilver—not the light but witness to the light.

                        The clock’s ticking first murmured the word eternity one Sunday afternoon in October when

she was seven.

                        She said she was going to get toe-shoes or go to medical school. To dance some new dance. Is

that how it happened to Arthur Murray but he misinterpreted the dream?

                        She must go more slowly. Her dream of the high-ceilinged butterfly-shaped building, the

scriptum scriptorum, might mean larva and cocoons, late silk, some third thing.

                        She has a watercolor voice. In these sweet, dangerous times, only biometrics can measure a life.

                        She lives in a jar; someone has poked holes in the lid and light comes in like night sky.

                        Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor, und bin so klug, und bin so klug....

                        The door repeated, “It all hinges on,” but she missed the last word.

 

 

 

 

 

* German phrases are from the opening scene of Goethe’s Faust.

 

 

 

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Veronica Patterson’s poetry collection, How to Make a Terrarium, was published by Cleveland State University (1987). Her poetry collection Swan, What Shores? (New York University Press, 2000) was a finalist for the Academy of American Poets’ 2000 James Laughlin Award and won annual poetry awards from both the Colorado Center for the Book and Women Writing the West. Her chapbook of prose poems This Is the Strange Part was published by Pudding House Publications in Spring 2002. She has also published one collection of poetry and photography, The Bones Remember: A Dialogue, with photographer Ronda Stone (Stone Graphics Press). Her poems have appeared in numerous publications including The Southern Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, The Sun, The Malahat Review, The Indiana Review, Another Chicago Magazine, The Mid-American Review, The Montserrat Review, The Bloomsbury Review, Willow Springs, The Colorado Review, Many Mountains Moving, Coal City Review, Dogwood, New Letters, Cimarron Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Runes, Pilgrimage, Prairie Schooner, and Lumina. She received Individual Artist’s Fellowships from the Colorado Council on the Arts in 1984 and 1997.