Joan Woodbridge

Joan Woodbridge Poems

"What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? " "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg


The season frazzles
...

The deciduous year attenuates
draws thin
my insubstantial resolve.
...

Light follows darkness as darkness light:
the stunned sun halts mid-dance
Shiva Nataraj
motionless
...

Kiswar Q'Inti*, The Royal Hummingbird of the North has entered this body
penetrating at the solar center
insinuating herself into each cell.
...

definitive compartment
outsized objects squeezing in
awkward
expose my naked unprolificity
...

quite suddenly
the leaves
are
gone
...

Only now may it be spoken
that the Divine had placed her numinous imprint
upon the earth of those several young summers
...

Time
the uneasy measure
we lay upon unfettered infinity
...

What is it that I ask of religion?

I ask
that you serve
...

I am She-Bear denned in sweet earth
I dream snow-covered leaves and frozen fields
I dream fish asleep in icy rivers
I dream leafless trees and waning light
...

adamantine density
inner halls so steeply narrow

how much substance must I shed
...

Things one does when one's lover is away:

- stand in the freezing wind waiting for a bus
...

how it began is unclear
innocence and earnestness
the impossible 'Why? '
...

labyrinthine confusion
intuition runs about three days ahead of feeling
and for us
there is little love to gentle the edges of this land
...

I
She who waits
She who is asleep to the present and lives in the future
She who waits to be awakened, defined, completed, validated
...

16.

What you Own:

these small cells complete of life
...

Winter is working us now
the subtle air holds
a hint of snow
and we are captured
...

Inky art of the broad-browed night:

the moon has fallen
in a puddle of water
...

arching magnificently into air
I swim my being
between bliss and necessity
calling
...

Joan Woodbridge Biography

Iteration I: Blessed by the Great Mother, I was dropped into this life, a member of the several generations destined to negotiate the erotic boundaries between cultural prohibition, the whipped up frenzy of rock and roll, and mind expanding drugs- a short but intense period that lay magically between the availability of birth control pills and antibiotics, and the fateful appearance of AIDS. Iteration II: I come from a long line of barbarians, land thieves, and genocidal murderers. My English forbearers arrived in America on the Mayflower. I have been taught to be proud of my ancestors. And, indeed, I am proud that my Puritan ancestors would not abide the oppression of anyone-not themselves, not others. I am proud that they took a stand against slavery. On my mother’s side I come from French Canadian and barely acknowledged Native American roots- the hunter and the hunted are alive in my genetic code.)

The Best Poem Of Joan Woodbridge

It's Spring- I Think

"What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? " "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg


The season frazzles
insanely
swinging recklessly between
tranquility and turbulence

forgetting herself
spring loses her mind
delivering a wintry waste
even as the undaunted snowdrops
push their cthonic heads
from the cold earth
striving toward sunlight and air

Yet hasn't this always been so?
The inconstancy of Spring?
What separates this one
from 86 or so others?

It must be the climate -
and I don't mean the weather.
May 2018

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