Quickening

Maureen Eppstein

AMETHYST GEODE

This half-round weight in my hand, crumb-
coated with rough gray lava, shows me no
reason for glistening pyramids the color
of violets. There was no light
in the rock womb of their growing.

I reach down to the core of this mystery, the place
where transformation happens, where what we think
we know becomes not so,
where what I am becomes some other thing—
my breath misting this purple surface
part of the same breath that began it.

My substance is that of earth
and air and water, all interchangeable
forms of the same elements.
Fire is the constant, transforming reality.
In molten lava that churned and boiled
from earth's fiery core, this geode began
as a bubble of air. Water
explored the rock's substance, made
alliance with atoms of silicon,
led them to the small round cave where they
arranged themselves slowly, according to
a pattern they know, the way our bodies
know to make hands and eyes.

This is not random stuff. Nor is
the arrangement of a violet's five petals more random
than the five sides of these amethyst crystals.
And no more fixed. Nor are my hands
that hold this former bubble, translucent as water
but now more solid than the lava
that once enclosed it. I am connected
to the flower and to the rock, our forms ephemeral,
our common substances continuing.

isbn 1-59661-079-4
30 pages/$9

With a naturalist’s eye for the precise and sensuous image and a writer’s care for the precise and sensuous word, Maureen Eppstein plants our human griefs into this book, roots them, and invites them to quicken into new life.
—Jane Hirshfield, author of Nine Gates; Given Sugar, Given Salt; and After

These eloquent poems appear at first to record detail, the ordinary, the everyday. They celebrate a swallow’s nest, sand grains, even the growth of weeds. But there is a twist: these are also dark pastorals that—in the poet’s words—review and regret “the damaged earth.” Again and again, these poems return to defenseless nature, to creatures looted and evicted, and to human lives hurt and interrupted. This shadowing of the relation between the poet and every kind of nature is the real theme of these fine poems. It deepens and sharpens their music.
—Eavan Boland, author of An Origin Like Water, The Lost Land, and Domestic Violence

Maureen Eppstein is a New Zealander now living in Mendocino, California, where she helps run the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. Widely published, her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, have received awards in many competitions, have been included in a textbook on computer graphics, and have been used in a university-level geology course.

Versions of these poems appeared in the following journals:

Avocet: “Black Angels,” “The Cliff Path,” “Meeting Death in the Early Morning,” “Squirrel in the Fig Tree,” “Tioga Pass, September”
Basalt: “Ambient Music”
Blue Unicorn: “Composting”
Convolvulus: “Amethyst Geode,” “Cymbidium,” “Fallen Sticks”
Fish Dance: “November Garden”
Quantum Tao: “Curves”
Sand Hill Review: “Calypso Orchid,” “Remnants,” “Sand Grains”

This manuscript was first runner-up in the 2007 Finishing Line Press/New Women's Voices competition.

The birds in the cover photo are baby violet-green swallows.

Cover photo by Tony Eppstein.

Contents

Curves 1
Amethyst Geode 2
The Cliff Path 4
Flicker 5
Cymbidium 6
The Quickening 7
Squirrel in the Fig Tree 8
Black Angels 9
Flight 10
Calypso Orchid 11
Red-Bellied Newt 12
Dwelling 14
Before the Storm 15
Swallow Nest 16
Composting 17
Rust 18
Sand Grains 20
Fallen Sticks 21
Remnants 23
November Garden 25
Meeting Death in the Early Morning 26
Tioga Pass, September 27
Ambient Music 29