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Jennifer Ley’s poetry has been featured on some of the best litery
sites
on the internet including: Recursive Angel, Grist On Line, Poetry Cafe,
Agnieszka's Dowry, and Zero City. She edits the award winning hypertext
web site - The Astrophysicist’s Tango Partner Speaks and is the Art
Editor for Recursive Angel.
Ms. Ley’s work has appeared in print in: Mobius, Perceptions, Salonika,
and Copulation and is promised to upcoming publications of Excursus, the
Best of Gravity (an anthology) and Sub-urbanterrain. She is an active
member of the NYC poetry circuit, and a member of the Athens Writing
Circle.
She has just been commissioned to design a new poetry locus for the
online community by Web Del Sol. Perihelion will premiere in June 1998.
A selection from her new chapbook, Riding the Meridian, (copyright 1998):
Mapping Your Skies
Sometimes when she tries to crawl
inside it feels effortless,
as if she’s travelled there before.
Other times, though she’s sure
she knows her landmarks
he’s like a new galaxy, and she without
the proper instruments
for sorting chroma into spectra.
Still other times
(and this is difficult to say - we all
need our secrets)
though she has found her way
he will say no, no, it is not that
not that at all, and launch a comet
to distract her, a nebula, a few new moons.
Science is far from accurate at times;
charting your engrams I read between
the lines and find type you never set,
or words you’ve still to recover,
left in that apprentice’s bin beside the door,
something you discarded
for want of better technology.
Put my hand on yours and hold the pen
onto this paper, onto this legend
we are writing together.
Help me chart a path in simple script
through your raging stars.
Amplitude
Amplitude is the order of the universe.
If you study the language of the instruments
that measure these things
you might better conduct
your own earth bound symphony.
Little sings silent in this night;
we rush at a thousand thousand decibels per second,
swing on the outside of the arm
the upbeat, pizzacatta
ah, yes let the strings enter, here
let the violas and cellos add a deeper note.
I know you’ve heard it late at night
a slight treble of breath,
the highest frequency of dying light.
Triangulated, you and I are always expanding.
You have seen the same star as I.
From your latitude it hangs a bit higher
but the arc is the same,
like the blood that beats in my veins
beats in your veins.
We share chemistry.
And the timpani
of what we are drumming down
in this accelerated dark
illuminates the spiral search of your arm
as it snakes around my clarinet waist.
My reed form sings.
Most Girls Don't Like Math
Or science, but
isn't that a comet
in your pocket?
Or are you just
an astrophysicist
who's glad to see me?
A man with an unsheathed
dendrite connection?
An uptake
uninhibited?
Your synapse fired
rebounded
heated by the sun?
Our wishes can be fishes
cuz I'm hooked on you
hoping to find
if not happiness cubed
then at least a bit of respite
in the inner workings
of this formula
where your y
weighs x less than my
y the heck not.
She Prefers
They could have crawled
into other crucibles
found other hands
to stoke the flames
met with alternate acids,
solutions, metals,
ferrous and fine.
She sings a coded string
in his arms
unravels a staircase of desire
braided out of the elementary.
There is a science to lust
a magnetic principle
to their attraction.
They sit at disparate poles
- eyes drawn to that planet singing
as rising star
a good omen
for twins chemically twined.
She could have crawled
into another crucible
but she prefers the beaker
in which she’s begun.
He prefers the stain
on his litmus
left by her soft palmed hands.
They prefer what they have become
when, like two sticks,
they rub up against each other
trade bark and burn.
Libra
A scale in heaven watches over us
measures that which might claim
too much of flesh
against the weight of honest earth.
Deserts tempt.
Oceans exert an otherworldly pull
while the tomes of sleeping giants
call out from their crackling pages
like the leaves in that willow near your doorstep
unfurling from winter bare whips to gracefilled green.
Let my thigh rest against yours,
all those muscles taut to quiver.
Let my mind lie close till leaping
I am inside you.
See that spark?
Blake’s visions hover over us,
Yeats looking over his shoulder.
The antiquarian wings of etched angels
soft, loft us higher.
It's a classic perspective
painted by Sagittarian arrows.
The putti use dying light.
You’ve felt the barb surely.
An artist’s heart beats in the hollow of your breast
like the small waves beating
against the shore.
The sky tips the scales
this way, that.
We settle back to balance —
rocking, always rocking.
The Astrophysicist’s Tango Partner Speaks
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/6115/
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