Norma Cole & Lindsay Hill

Thursday, August 6
7:30 pm

Concordia Coffee House
2909 NE Alberta

$5.00 suggested donation


Norma Cole's new work just out: Natural Light (Libellum) and Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988-2008 (City Lights); forthcoming in June 2010, TO BE AT MUSIC: Essays & Talks (Omnidawn). Current translation work includes Danielle Collobert's Journals, Fouad Gabriel Naffah's The Spirit God and the Properties of Nitrogen, and Crosscut Universe:  Writing on Writing from France.

Lindsay Hill lives in Portland. A Spare Room organizer emeritus, his most recent books are Sea of Hooks (Arundel Seattle) and Contango (Singing Horse Press).



Riptide

                               There's a shadow over the city
                    the light, as usual, framing and erasing

Just say you
dream fires each
night smoothing each
collapsing page from

the throat talking
in a series
of measures in
the high desert

the perfect life
in a series
of measured gestures
an invitation to

see the world
from a bridge
that burns in
the next night


Norma Cole




Sea of Hooks

A boy grew up
beside a sea of hooks
and he learned to swim
in that sea
and to notice the hooks
as they rose
and fell
and twisted in the tides

And he learned
to feel his way
at first very slowly
in the sea of hooks

And he noticed that all around him
people had hooks
in their skin
and were being pulled
in many directions

And many of the hooks
were small and hard to see
barely silver in the glinting
light down deep
barely visible
and numerous

And some
from the place of his birth
would not put a toe
in that sea

And some lived
their entire lives
full of hooks
in the underneath

Lindsay Hill