William Logan
Ode for the Turn of the Year
The brief, impersonal, conversations they had together were
creating that peculiar intimacy which consists in shyness.
—Middlemarch
The plainsong of wren and thrush
might have plotted the ending
in palmettos or azaleas. Eaves
dribbled after downpour
after downpour scarred the clapboards
the sun made whole again.
The sea vanished here
when monsters still ruled the waves,
the antique bed of sand
lush under the preposterous
feather hats of palms, the mangle
of native and invading grass,
Burmese python, Nile monitor,
strangers in estranged lands
searching for recognitions of home.
Dark fell on the shadows of film noir.
William Logan on Brianna Steidle
Brianna Steidle’s poems have that air of the strange infused in the perfectly ordinary. She manages to discover, with a slight cant of eyesight, something fresh in what is often seen plainly. She does what Elizabeth Bishop did, with a wave of a magic hickory-stick. Ms. Steidle’s poems (I’ve chosen one she wrote as an undergraduate) manage to shift matters off-center, so here the ancient Jewish ritual of Tashlich is seen entirely through the trash discarded. That throw-away ritual has a certain uncomfortable resonance now, one that itself requires atonement.
Brianna Steidle
Tashlich
Long-limbed waves swat at the crusts.
Away, black mold! Green fuzz! Dried husks!
The wrack line is littered,
the jetty slick with bread.
A hundred tzitzit wriggle at the water’s edge,
and a gull cocks his eye at their tentacles.
Felted shadows curl over themselves
to cast out crumbling sins;
loaves trace shorter arcs
as the tide comes in, but the loggerheads
have their own ritual:
a young turtle scrapes together her first nest;
crumbs rest weightlessly on her unhatched eggs.
Under a lidded sky, the dunes roll to a boil.
William Logan
Ode for the Turn of the Year
The brief, impersonal, conversations they had together were
creating that peculiar intimacy which consists in shyness.
—Middlemarch
The plainsong of wren and thrush
might have plotted the ending
in palmettos or azaleas. Eaves
dribbled after downpour
after downpour scarred the clapboards
the sun made whole again.
The sea vanished here
when monsters still ruled the waves,
the antique bed of sand
lush under the preposterous
feather hats of palms, the mangle
of native and invading grass,
Burmese python, Nile monitor,
strangers in estranged lands
searching for recognitions of home.
Dark fell on the shadows of film noir.
Brianna Steidle
Tashlich
Long-limbed waves swat at the crusts.
Away, black mold! Green fuzz! Dried husks!
The wrack line is littered,
the jetty slick with bread.
A hundred tzitzit wriggle at the water’s edge,
and a gull cocks his eye at their tentacles.
Felted shadows curl over themselves
to cast out crumbling sins;
loaves trace shorter arcs
as the tide comes in, but the loggerheads
have their own ritual:
a young turtle scrapes together her first nest;
crumbs rest weightlessly on her unhatched eggs.
Under a lidded sky, the dunes roll to a boil.
Brianna Steidle holds an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she is a lecturer and a reader for The Hopkins Review. Between poems, her job titles include accounting assistant, event photographer, and goldfish trainer.
