from Mulberry Street, GE Patterson

3rd in the WinteRed series, from Mulberry Street features six poems by poet GE Patterson.

excerpt from Apparatus for Distillation

In the world in which there is no one hoping
But as a strange plenitude with for trees
The stones breaking broken into small stones
What bits of them brighten make shells and glass
Like stars waves unbending the bands of light
Of sweet to flowering and fruited bareness
So that there is that in you grand in feeling
Alive a need turned to well as a thing
Or the man for whom once there were the women
Seen then in that difference swimming and home
So there the end this closing beauty brothers
All of that then in alchemical tones
Have each from the other silence a blessing
What is still in us there as that our feeling
In that world which is there is always hoping



Good-bye, Abel’s quiet blessing



GE PATTERSON'S collection Tug is available from Graywolf Press. Recent poems can be found in Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics, Swerve, American Letters and Commentary, Aphrodite of the Spangled Mind, and Open City.