Inadvertent Elegies

is the name of Sarah Jenkins' chapbook, which I "won" a copy of here and which I recently read through and of course loved. I hope she doesn't mind if I share a few lines here because they are beautiful and full of heart (as is the poet), which I've been told is "the crucial bone for a writer." So:

First and Last Looks

In the beginnig was light / emanating from the first / opened eye; the implications / I let you enumerate as we exchange first and last / looks. Look / I don't know / what I see / until I see you. / I don't want to see / until I see / you. The eye emenates all / opening a thin lid / sudden expected sight. The eye emenates / all things, bright and dark, all / people, places, things. That first flame of being, beginning / kindled under streetlights / along horizons.

Emanate: give birth / give light. I give you / you give me / illumination. / We belong on the horizons, / our eyes lighting the skyline. / We belong looking at each other / for the first time, quick / glancing-- / the next word blows, but I see / white light separated: / red, orange, yellow, / orange, yellow.

[Walt Whitman Blesses the Grass]

Walt Whitman blesses the grass growing from our beautiful bodies--excellent argument, until I find you / at the base of a desert mountain, the red earth eating your bones.

Did you read Whitman? Did you imagine your body joining the mothers and sons and old men waiting? I imagine your soul triumphant, but your body--

I hate this desert, the land flat and empty, every thing dead. / If I were Whitman, I would recite your name over and over, / in perfect syllables, but I cannot translate it to sun and dust and / there are no seasons here.

I imagine you in the heat, how it makes every thing quiet.