“Winter Garden” and “Moleskine Knockoffs,” Two Poems by Emma Ruth Rundle
From the Collection “The Bella Vista”
“Winter Garden”
I can’t write about Borges
and blindness
and the beauty of
the twilight of the senses.
Because I’m not over Burroughs
and burdens
and intimate guns pointed
in the winter garden.
Between the the branches
The leafless tree of family
The greenless wreath of bornness
The splintering body of ancestry
The addled hands of mothers
The distant hands of fathers
The violent nature of our being here.
The violent nature of love.
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“Moleskine Knockoffs”
I’ve given up on paper and little notebooks
The ones you gifted me shall be the last to return from foreign shores
Empty souvenirs of their wordless owner’s wordlessness
The last to hit a burn pile
See, you’ve drunk up all the language.
Your vocation hoards the remnants and sparse syntax
So that I have no where from which to begin a line
And am corralled by uncertain phrases
But to call to you—that’s still clear and as incorruptible
As the first formed vowel in the primordial moths mum
Everything after a name is lost to the poet’s collection
Jangling around like Scrabble pieces in your unsentimental machine
From a couplet turned fragment
Ambling scribbling taping blindly with a bloody grin
Back on foreign shores,
He’s not yet vacuumed the landscape of its languages here
The giant laureate himself never crossed the seas
And so I’m gathering again in this Eden
And free to sing from outside the formless place
Of that man’s wake
Every narcissus a new turn of phrase
Every flight a fresh metaphor
Restore my tooth and pen
In the eruption of this nubile season
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The Bella Vista by Emma Ruth Rundle is available via Unnamed Press.
Emma Ruth Rundle
Emma Ruth Rundle is an internationally recognized musician and a multi-disciplinary artist: a painter, director, and poet. She has released 6 full-length solo albums and collaborated with other artists such as Dylan Carlson of Earth, Chelsea Wolfe, Thou, and others. Her music has been described as a hybrid of folk, ambient noise, and metal; as well as “patiently haunting” (New York Times), “swelling with gothic drama” (Pitchfork), and “starkly beautiful” (The Guardian). She was the first female curator of the Roadburn Festival in the Netherlands and has performed extensively all over the western world. She has had two solo exhibitions of her artwork (On Dark Horses at Ars Memoria, Chicago 2018; Dowsing Voice at Lethal Amounts, Los Angeles 2022) and has published poetry in The Heartworm Reader and in Sad Happens, an anthology by Brandon Stosuy.
