Jennifer Ley: Poems
THE
LURE
| TEMPORAL
DISCOVERY | ON
FAITH
 Founder
of the internet literary magazine Riding
the Meridian and
the award winning hypertext poetry site The Astrophysicist's
Tango Partner Speaks, Jennifer Ley's newest work is more
often in the field of hypertext and hypermedia. Examples can be
found on the web at the April feature and the Valentine
Files at the Electronic Poetry Center,
in the web journals Cauldron and Net, Framed, The Animist,
Snakeskin, and Conspire, and in the trAce anthology:
My Millennium. Her web works have been exhibited at
Digital Arts and Culture '99, at the Wednesdays at 4 readings
series at SUNY-Buffalo, and will be included in the SIGGRAPH 2000
Art Gallery, the Ink.ubation Salon sponsored by the trAce online
writing community, and digital conferences planned this year in
South Africa and Eastern Europe. A 1998 Pushcart nominee
for her text poetry, Jennifer Ley's earlier work has appeared
in a wide variety of print publications, both on and off line.
A limited edition, paper version of her web work "The
Birth of Detachment" is forthcoming from PaperBrain Press
in conjunction with its online publication at the Iowa Review
Web. She is a founding member of the Internet Literary
Editor's Fellowship-- ILEF
and a member of the Literary Advisory Committee for the Electronic
Literature Organization.
THE
LURE
Make
sure you are not sleeping
with
the enemy, intimacy is best
achieved
with strangers, before
you
know the true dimensions
of
the other, during that brief
period
when what you expect
and
wish to be reflects off the face
of
your beloved like a pale, new moon,
lures
you to the lip of the cenote.
How
else to make a woman,
usually
rational, sure of herself,
contemplate
sacrifice? Promise
her
immortality, goddesshood,
a
life in the lap of the ever-after,
the
nameplate of a martyr, for
once
she has leapt, there is no egress.
No
one will throw her a rope
and
the sides of the pit
are
too slippery for ascent.
TEMPORAL
DISCOVERY
She
is married now but has not taken
her
husband's name does this mean
she
is not his wife? If she gave up her birth name
and
sported her husband's would she cease
to
be her father's daughter? What's in a name
has
been asked and answered in this case
as
the lawyers would state if you requested
further
clarification, as he who watched
the
path of her approach claims now
to
name her, stamp her as something he
has
discovered. But a name is not the meat
of
a thing, can merely mold its flesh for a time.
Think
of the planet who thought to be mercurial,
but
gazed too long in one direction, found his face
forever
locked upon the core. But comets keep
their
distance, secure in their orbits,
sure
of their eventual direction, back out
into
the spawning night and the birthing cloud,
the
galaxy on the edge of a universal arm.
At
the edge, in the dark, she waits, patiently
rebuilding
what was lost on her last solar run,
the
spark and thrust of her the same.
By
the celestial clock she is ageless. Perhaps
another
will seek to name her when she returns,
or
perhaps she will seek this time to name herself.
ON
FAITH
I
thought this was the season of the resurrection,
the
time when we unwrapped our shrouds and
found
new skin, shed the carapace of so many
unoriginal
sins. I thought the only stones
were
those rolled wide to set the risen free,
not
those hurled by other hands, nor rocks
that
worked their way into my clutch, cutting
deep.
I thought I was supposed to speak
in
tongues, bud from bulb in sunny
comprehension.
Tomorrow the resurrection
may
light my lips and face. But tonight I wait
crouched
close to earth, a crocus fearing frost.
Copyright © 1999, 2000 by Jennifer Ley. All rights reserved.
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