Jen Karetnick
Riding and Falling
the Slants of Earth
After Dream House, Later by Susan MacMurdy
What is the way in again?
What speed am I at here, on my knees?
It is not easily negotiated, love,
the going and coming like the useless
splinters of memory into the avenue
of mottled shadows.
The longing is to have survived
the astonishments, the foliage
all around them gleaming,
the night out there a shirt rolled up.
I felt it like temperature, the heart
formulating its alleyways of discovery,
the tools that pave the way into this,
our only soil. Why not pretend
we wished for it?
Notes:
This ekocento is composed of lines from fifteen Jorie Graham poems.
Source poems, in the order they appear:​
“Act III, Sc. 2” from The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994. The Ecco
Press, 1995.
“The Visible World” from The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994. The
Ecco Press, 1995.
“Mirror Prayer” from Poetry. November 1983.
“Scarcely There” from Poetry. January 2019.
“What the End Is for” from The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994. The
Ecco Press, 1995.
“Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt” from Erosion. Princeton University Press, 1983.
“Prayer” from Never. HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2002.
“Mother’s Hands Drawing Me” from Poetry. December 2016.
“The Errancy” from The Errancy. HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1997.
“Exchange” from Poetry. October 2017.
“Poem” from Poetry. January 2020.
“The Guardian Angel of the Private Life” from The Errancy. HarperCollins Publishers Inc,
1997.
“Underneath (13)” from Swarm. The Ecco Press, 1999.
“Full Fathom” from Poetry. February 2008.
“Over and Over Stitch” from The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994. The
Ecco Press, 1995.
The winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award for Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), Jen Karetnick is the author of ten additional poetry collections. She is the co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day.