paper • 65 pages • 14.95
ISBN-13: 1-884800-55-6
PASSING OVER WATER
The sunset is blinding today.
The bridge seems to have shed its cables,
And everything tapers to a methodical hissing, a calm.
I cannot hear above the wheels that softly sing
What seems a lullaby to soothe all of creation,
Meant to reach even into the rich marrow of stars.
I dreamed this once,
The bridge, the sea, the song of the train,
And in the dream there were fluorescent trees,
Fuchsia, bright yellow, electric teal,
Brushing against the sky in the breeze like fiber-optic lamps.
In the dream there was a feeling of utter silence,
Palpable as sketches for buildings,
And I wondered when it would leave, if it would leave at all,
Or if it would exist only in the prism of that instant
Where earlier I’d heard a voice urging me
Through an anguished mesh of faces and rain:
Forget everything you know, it is of no use to anyone,
And your ominous conjectures will shrivel away
In the salt of your own affliction.
I remember I sat in my seat just as I am now sitting,
Whispering over and over dark is right, dark is right,
And when I turned my face to the clear, dark window
I saw lions struggling to climb out of the sea.
“Dark matter and dark energy disturb the physicists. Noelle Kocot is already at ease with a split universe. She orchestrates her good wild poetry with an old constancy. But the usual contiguities don’t hold; and the usual figures are defiantly cut apart. It’s as if Jackson Pollock had splashed objects not paint—and didn’t he? This all-overness in Kocot’s poetry is overwhelming, full of doors after doors after doors, caprices, gardens and motives—and her unwavering voice.” — David Shapiro
“Noelle Kocot’s intimidating and inspiring presence perches on my shoulders every time I write a poem. I envy her energy and her absolute freedom. She has the ability to dive headlong into a powerful and dark emotional situation while remaining much too crafty to let the poem be merely melodramatic. She says I write very fast. There is something to this /I think. That something is a voracious, almost frantic appetite that finds poetry in everything. Even in The Jefferson’s Weezie. Her power and her poems are an encouragement and a constant amazement.” —Matthew Rohrer