Crocus (Poets Out Loud)

Whether Aligned with the mechanism whereby the spirit is borne aloft through song comes again the question: whether. And not soothed so much as opened by the boy soprano's Sanctus, what moves in the mind as the throat constricts in sympathy, one note peeled from the last, fine as paper slipped from a garlic bulb, veined, translucent, is whether—as if wound through the spiraling amplitude, purpled, fretted, one voice suspended in concentration of prayer or terror wills itself above faltering, more perfect since time must soon break it. And made it. Whether and by whatever impossible arrangement of stars, harmonies, correspondences through which the music finds the spirit and like a blade slits and releases, circulates the question through the phrase, the delicate engine—as if it matters: the song rises, everything goes with it. The poems in Crocus take as their starting points the interior universes created by myth, art, and memory, and through the exploration of these terrains create new ways of understanding the ordinary.