Crossing Over: Poems
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About this ebook
Long’s work begs to be read aloud in order to savor the rich language and rhythm she instills in each poem. She explores the beauty of specific bridges while employing them as a metaphor for crossings to death (a sister’s suicide), eros, and art. Part elegy, the book also explores living, remembering, and celebrating.
Priscilla Long
PRISCILLA LONG is a Seattle-based writer, writing teacher, and editor. She is the author of Crossing Over: Poems, The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life, and Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry.
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Crossing Over - Priscilla Long
Crossing Over
seriestitle© 2015 by Priscilla Long
All rights reserved. Published 2015
Printed in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5 6
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Long, Priscilla.
[Poems. Selections]
Crossing over : poems / Priscilla Long.
pages cm. — (Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8263-2396-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8263-3706-1 (electronic)
I. Title.
PS3612.O5243A6 2015
811’.6—dc23
2014036088
Cover illustration: Murray Morgan and Downtown,
photograph courtesy of Scott Hingst
Author photograph courtesy of Tony Ober
Cover designed by Felicia Cedillos
The self must be a bridge, not a pit.
—Theodore Roethke
1. Memory’s Load
Sister Ghost
Your beauty stuns, but
it’s static, photographic.
Your stories stir the dust,
stick to the broom.
Your drawings dream
your fine-stitched quilt.
Your death—your gift
of stones to us. No blame.
Suicides are deranged
with despair. Oh Susanne.
Were there a bridge back to you,
I would take it anywhere.
Queen of the Cut
Cable-stayed bridge, Tacoma, Washington
Night-gem, sun-brooch, sky-jewel.
A phantom ship—tall-masted, cable-rigged.
Kandinsky bird in blue air.
Spare. Neat as a girl-queen
above the cut. Tacoma’s quarrel
with rust and rotten brick.
She reigns, angles of gleams,
smoke-daughter, penumbra
of Mount Tacoma. Snow-peaks
dream her tides, her white piers.
She wends her wheel-trail
through ribbons of light and steel.
Note: In Pacific Northwest nomenclature a cut
is a canal.
Psalm to Stones
You set me down
in a desert of stones,
you crowned me
Queen of Stones,
and so I praise
cold stones, broken
off the mother-rock,
windswept to orphan shores.
I praise stone caverns,
bat-ridden and dark,
black basalt
worn smooth as skin.
I praise the bellystone
of Buddha, the burn
of Buddha’s breath.
I praise your