[Editors’ note: This post will be our final miCRo for this calendar year. See you in January 2019!]
Miriam Bird Greenberg
photo by Jonathan Michael Castillo
Associate Editor Caitlin Doyle: In “Invocation,” Miriam Bird Greenberg invites us to consider language’s sonic sorcery as both a portal to and extension of the natural world. Gesturing toward Denise Levertov’s poem of the same name, she invokes not only “Lares,” traditional Greek deities associated with protecting domestic and agricultural space, but Levertov herself. Greenberg parallels the power of supernatural figures with that of human makers, whether those who build with words or those who use their hands to shape the world in tangible ways (“spirit / of square-cut iron nails and hand- / forged horseshoe”). Just as nature forever pulses with the possibility of renewal, Greenberg suggests, so too do the energies of creation, linguistic and otherwise, that allow us to “beckon water” out of “rotted stumps.”
To hear Miriam Bird Greenberg read “Invocation,” click below:
Invocation
Haunt of bent hacksaw blades; spirit of square-cut iron nails and hand- forged horseshoe hung by the butchering frame to beckon water rise up out of rotted stumps: All night the animals sing their somnambulist’s slow tune tendering night unto sunrise. Hens wake from their low perches in the mulberry tree. The old water tank filled up with rain finally rusts through. O Lares, don’t leave; a chicken snake is unhinging its jaw.
Miriam Bird Greenberg is a poet and occasional essayist with a fieldwork-derived practice. The author of In the Volcano’s Mouth (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), which won the 2015 Agnes Starrett Lynch Prize, Greenberg has received fellowships from the NEA, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Poetry Foundation. The line “O Lares, don’t leave” is taken from the Denise Levertov poem of the same name.
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