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Lyn Hejinian

Lyn Hejinian

Lyn Hejinian's most recent book of poetry is The Book of a Thousand Eye (Omnidawn, 2012). With Barrett Watten, she is the co-editor of A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982-199 (Wesleyan, 2013). She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley English Department, where, in 2009, she founded the Solidarity Alliance, an activist coalition of workers, staff, students, and faculty fighting the privatization of public education.

Safe And Sure

                    for Robert Pinsky

Georgiana gestures with Great and Glorious Pickles
Zelda names hers Zesty Zealous Pickles
Seth declares his to be Sweet and Supersmart Pickles

Wilbur and Rubber and Feather and Dawn
Alice and Zealous

Does a tattoo make you hungry?
Do you chew cashews thoroughly?

Rich are the ridings of scissors on tile
Melancholy is the raga at nightfall
Arboreal are the sunbeams on the branches of the redwood and the chickadees in them
Quixotic is the temperament of the palomino on the savannah

I have too little marmalade

Pots are spun from cotton, bowls are made of fat
Elephant dung is made by rats
Too little is made of the suffering of sufferers, too much is made of engineering
The sun drains, the fog rocks, the clock talks
Blistered whistles in a jug are audible from afar

To wonder is to whip-sneeze and despindle and unwash
A slender greyhound sneaks a peek between your ankles at a turtle
"Your ankles"?
It's okay, you're safe

We might call Stigma Storage, Sigmund Stalk
The mint in the mainstream has mankind in shoots
Perhaps the first poets were namers

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