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A crush of oily plant and treated white

By Joan Houlihan Joan Houlihan

A crush of oily plant and treated white, wrapt and reached by root, sky-touched and still, a bud in leaf: make of me a body. Oil me, hand and foot, bind me tight and scented green: this is my dressing, done. Ay lived and spoke to what ay was. No matter if you answer. On hand and foot an oil and scent. Across my forehead fingers sweep a clay. Remember what ay was and am. Kind horse, lie down beside.

FOOTNOTES: The Us is a formally fractured poetic sequence spoken by a chronically nomadic people. A member of the group (Ay) dramatizes the coming to self-consciousness of an individual in the group.—JH

Source: Poetry (December 2008).

Biography

Joan Houlihan's most recent book of poetry, The Us (2009), was named a "must read" book of 2009 by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Lucie Brock-Broido called the poems in The Us "just extraordinary: wildly hewn, classically construed, and skewed by an imagined lexicon...In a voice that is elemental, ancient, animistic, pre-lingual even, the speaker manages, with nothing short of magic, to communicate...in a language both . . .

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