Introduction: Cecily Parks

Did I mention the touch? Happiness, I mean: plant your wing beat in my sleep—Buffalo-, goose-, and bearberries. Such an odd-berried cobbler in the oven are Cecily Parks’ poems of the earth’s jurisdictions, all the turnings inside. Here calf, here lamb, here a wish for a garden, to garden, be gardened. After tabulations of climates, soils, wyoming’s thrall, I began to forget, am shot through with field. I am waiting then, to serve the undone: astral, petal, not bad, but wayward. To be the next verse, the hole the shovel blade sings to. Self portrait as cow skull flush with lupine, self portrait as perch swirling in the parlor. I am the most benign unknown: slate length essays, honeysuckle’s clockwise, spine seam, jaw knot. Dear Aleotory, Dear Magnitude, the jam jar waiting for weed blooms in a waiting house like mine. Each a calligraphic constellation, Cecily Parks poems wait to serve the undone, fumble for a syntax to utter the tameness, the variations of beast and lover that are the earth. Lost here, she says, get tired of loneliness. Were I loved, I would be braver. Did I mention the touch? Garden, shake me something fierce. Cecily Parks.