Memento Mori: Poetry and Art

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Memento Mori Poetry by Cheryl Snell Art by Janet Snell

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© 2011 by Cheryl Snell Scattered Light Publications All rights reserved. ISBN 9781448625949

Praise for Memento Mori

'Memento mori' is another term for still life which is another way of describing observed carefully arranged items worth remembering, Memento mori is a particularly apt title for

this collection of poems and paintings by the sisters Snell. Cheryl Snell, the writer poet,

combines her sparkling little observations of

life and ordinary things such as childhood re-

veries and mental notes of

things/incidents/people she has observed

and transformed into poem form: Janet Snell, the visual poet, continues to create aqueous paintings of expressionistic nature that pull

the eye into worlds of fantasy and illusion.

Part of the joy of the collaboration of the two v

artists is that they resist the temptation to

'illustrate' each other. That would be the expected result in a collaboration - one artist has an idea and the other elaborates on it.

Not so with MEMENTO MORI…And as the book flows - a feast for the eye and a

recalled pleasure of reading memorable poetry. An Excellent book, this!

----Grady Harp

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Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgment is made to the edi-

tors of the magazines in which some of these pieces first appeared

About the Authors

Cheryl and Janet Snell are sisters with a dozen fiction, art, and poetry books between them. Visit them at

www.snellsisters.blogspot.com for details.

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Contents

Intricate Things Second Glance He Peels his Love Skin Hunger Wet All the Greens in the Wheel Closer Poem with Radiometer Nest Hope The Trouble with Hope Painted Garden

Spent Table for One Qualities of Light Tautology of Blue Hindsight Progress

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Memento Mori

Intricate Things in their Fringed Peripheries

In the stunned hush of its own snapped strands, the spider writhes and rolls in a ransom of insects.

When there is no one to pay, how does survival happen?

Above a ruination of silk geometries, the algorithm is skritched on the air--one thin filament reaching out only trying to connect

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Second Glance at First Light

You stand in the circle of the porch lamp, key turning in the lock.The sight pulls my hair up hard and I observe you like an astronomer shedding first light on a new world. I want to see your

face at 30 frames/ second all of my life, but whoever holds up the

universe is blowing bubbles, trying to capsize the pilot of waves vibrating drunkenly. So we surge forward, like noses in cinema kisses. We lean in blind, staggering ever closer toward God.

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He Peels his Love like an Apple

The man wants the lady apple. It’s unripe, but he’s hungry now,

and there are plenty of other fruits in the fridge.

All apples sweeten in the dark, so it doesn’t matter which one

he chooses. Peel spirals below his knife. He brings the flesh to his mouth.

A worm’s sudden slither is the last thing

he expects to see—the apple hollowed-out, juice running bitter down his chin.

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Skin hunger

She palms his belly, follows the bellows of his breath. Is it skin

that conducts the rise and fall,

touch that brailles intention? To lift her fingers now would skew his rhythm, all movement seizing so she curves her hand

above the little light that’s left,

and molds the shape of absence.

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Wet

Bed all morning, stuttering rain. A car hisses past, spraying shoals of water

into green air. If we stoppered some in crystal with the light

slanting through, the world beyond would waver, unsure

whether we laid down together because of the storm,

or because the storm

had filled the world with music---

rolling tympani,

the reedy throats of birds.

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all the greens in the wheel

tea-green rain slants through a wet sky -slickshine streets, rainbow

puddles. night crawls across our bed,

and you climb in with your warm hands.

in the lime light, we promise

that ice won’t crack the water pipes,

the garden hose won’t stiffen for months. the fog of a lopsided moonface erases the memory

of a myrtle green winter

in favor of sap, moss, pine and we pull in the green

all around us.

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Closer

I wait with crisscrossed nerves vibrating like colors on a map. You are nearer now, a flicker of light upon a spine, floating toward me over carousels of luggage, through time zones pocked with stoplights and the bulge of alternate lives. One stumble away from

buzzing fluorescence and more rude hands, you stand still for a

moment before the quick bound down the escalator, your eyes on the exit,its revolving door, fingers curling around the handle on the yellow cab now roaring into rush-hour surge.

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Poem with Radiometer Four vanes pierced by a spindle, a cotillion in black and white. Moving in atmosphere lighter than air,

one searches out the other moving away. As inside the glass, outside. You move slowly through me, and light bounces from one skin to the other, a kind of feint. But what muscles endless spin?

Dark hides from light as light pursues it. You knuckle your eyes in disbelief, saying it’s dangerous to stand this close to such a rapidly rotating truth. If this was an experiment, it could be extrapolated to metaphor. We think: it takes opacity to capture light. We think: if only the clouds did not erase the sun, we could quantify forever. 10

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Nest We’re out in the yard, doing what we do— he’s raking, I’m dividing bulbs. If you go

with perennials, you never start from scratch.

When we’re done, he tucks my hand in his. Our stack of lined palms and thin-skinned fingers nest like sparrows returned to the redbud tree. One spring, they came in with a ribbon tied

to a burst balloon. Lashing one end to a branch, they wove the satin through their cup of netted twigs.

The task took hours; and while they worked,

they sang as if courage had nothing to do with it

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Hope a call like a rusty hinge skreaks overhead

garden gates open

only to close again reluctantly. but this is not about redemption, it’s about identity

and how the glazed sky hurled through with feathers will sometimes part like water for one bird. it comes to perch

on a tangle of branches. suddenly there are many birds. 13

The Trouble with Hope It’s so fragile anything can kill it— one cold night, the smoking chimney too far off in the distance, another drought, everyone at the table either drunk or estranged; but like a fisted bud, it rides out even the deluge that bends bough to ground, and so persists---sometimes unsure,

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like leaves curling and uncurling outside the staking cage, or blind as a root-plunge that draws sap to stem. Like blood to a muscle, it moves inside you, a shadow as fickle as desire, yet ready to embrace you if you would just turn around.

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Painted Garden

If he had simply faded like a shout from the street, the chaste tree

she loves for its blue irony

would not have been planted,

nor the red clover made to bleed. It was always too dark, or windy,

it was too late to call

or she would have grown blooms enough to rasp against the drainpipe,

she could have frilled the sills with fringe. To load a brush with moments,

who doesn’t want that? She wasn’t trying to mock the sun with her night-blooming flowers. She was trying to mend

the foxglove’s broken hearts.

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Spent The childhood house,

torn down to a sprawl of stones, has a doorframe

that contracts with cold.

Bitter enough to shrink

the room where the birthday boy is blowing on trickster candles, where striped wax melts

through his singed fingers, still he blows. What ripples from that— walls within walls

far from the only window still open, ghosted curtains billowing into the light

alive with silver

from so many extinguished stars..

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Table for One She enters the diner, a book in her purse; sits down,

opens a menu. Tongues

on her sneakers

twist like the urge to flee.

She steals a glance at her wrist, watch-face ticking in circles;

notices that the table has a head,

a chair with a back

and arms to rest her elbows on. To knuckle her spine against the chair’s ladder of slats comforts her with some frame of reference.

Carnations nod in a vase.

She fingers the blown glass, its slender neck, the wet crystal lip and the room begins to hum

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Qualities of Light The open-mouthed jar fills

with light and brittle shadows. The lid is a tight fit—

but this isn’t about escape,

it’s about absence: bulbs blowing out, wings folding in on a lack.

What I need is the stunned

buzz of resurrection—lightning

bugs stranded on cracked glass gravel,

garden hose spraying small skeletons back to life, their sudden loft into night-blind air.

The blinking ribbon’s loop through backyard woods

only half-illuminates the trees. But this isn’t about light.

It’s about radiance. 21

Tautology of Blue We are Here. There looks better,

though it could be a trick; illusion, bad camera angles. We won’t lose a thing by going There. Here fits

into There, a matrouska

of defunct eyes and ears. The move Thither to Yon implies a stretch of homelessness.

Against the horizon, words

spread out like a migration of wings on rivers reflecting mountains.

We’d never have gone if we’d known we’d end up where we started.

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Hindsight The thing about it is its size.

It’s smaller, and your sister is there on the other side of the screen, waiting

to be told goodbye. It’s not as if you could hop on your bike and rush back to hug her, although that might enlarge the moment. Instead, the memory keeps shrinking, blinking off and on like fireflies she used to catch in a jar. Their pale light receded

as you rode past your father watering the brittle grass

full of the ends of other lives.

Beyond that extinguished light, the memory of light; and behind that,

the sound of your sister pushing through the screen, twisting open the jar. 23

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Progress We drown in the details— what to bring to potluck,

where to meet for coffee.

There’s a Starbuck’s on the corner where we once sold lemonade,

our homemade sign coming apart in an attic somewhere.

We sift through the rubble

for the precious thing we lost when the future rolled into town

on a bulldozer. It plowed into our plans,

burying them under stories of glass and brick but nothing much changed. Look at the way we connect now, all scribbled skin and logistics. We still lift our heads

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when a foreman’s whistle blows,

but slowly, without expectation. We stand close, on the verge of moving,

held back by the strong-arm of routine. Last week another crew packed up

and headed out. We followed

for a few steps,but it gets dark early now and it’s easy to get lost

on a map redrawn in our sleep.

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