Barbara F. (Freedgood) Lefcowitz (1935- )Barbara F. Lefcowitz a publié sept recueils de poésie, un roman, ainsi que des poèmes, essais et histoires dans plus de 350 revues. journals. Elle est récipiendaire de plusieurs distinctions honorifiques du Maryland Arts Council, National Endowment for the Arts et de la Fondation Rockefeller, parmi d'autres.
Née à New York elle vit présentement à Bethesda, au Maryland. Elle enseigne l'écriture au Anne Arundel College, voyage à travers le monde et peint.
Plusieurs de ses poèmes utilisent une imagerie astronomique, ou liée à la physique et à la neurologie, bien que jamais d'une manière technique.
The same dark matter
that holds a galaxy's stars
in its gravitational grip
so they will neither collide
nor break loose
binds the many bodies of my life :
the child wearing a bright wreathe of berries,
the girl tugged by moons that draw blood,
the saturnine young woman
kept captive by the blue rings of ice
that surround her days,
who at last gives birth to the bodies of others
tightly bound to her,
but only so they may achieve
sufficient light and mass
to unbind themselves,
seek their own place in the sky.
And now the wanderer
through forests, the intricate bark
of whose trees brings forth a sap
never suspected before; through cities
whose signs blink lines and curves
that favor not even the most faraway cousin
in her family of languages.
Though she finds her eyes nearly blinded
by the same cosmic dust that turns sunsets red,
she can see with utmost clarity
the child's wreathe, the girl's moons,
the young woman's blue rings of ice --
the wanderer's particles, waves,
and molecules intact
within her body's sheathe of light
until her dark matter
begins to crack like old library paste,
first the harsh words, then stiff sentences
slipping bit by bit through the ripples
that form as the matter recedes
and the whole galaxy shatters,
an explosion so fiercely hot
the old text burns, blackens
to dark matter
in search of newborn stars.Barbara F. Lefcowitz, Weber Studies, Winter 1999 ; 16(2)
The music is the same :
the same papery castanets
of October leaves
as their dry edges meet
in a light breeze,
briefly touch.
Likewise the palette :
familiar reds and deep yellows,
the most intense blue, as if
an overly generous dose of cobalt
had slipped into a glaze.
Nor can I say the air's texture
differs from that of a year ago :
taut, a starched sheet
with knife-sharp hospital corners.
Still the furious madness of a few
from the other side of the globe
has so deranged the seasons
a wintery dark
eclipses the autumn sun,
whose warmth I can fee
l but cannot believe
even as it touches my skin.Barbara F. Lefcowitz
There are a thousand times more cells in a human body than there are bright stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
John Gribbin Very late at night
I trade places with the Milky Way,
not by rising to the sky
or bending the galaxy into my bed,
but by musing how sapphires
strung on spiral chains
illuminate the space inside my skin
as if a collapsed molecular cloud
had spawned a profusion of bright blue stars
that, like cells, daily wear out and die,
but so rapidly replace themselves
my inner streets and plazas never darken
and all the bone-white buildings shine,
as if I contained a private Greek island
free from marauding tourists
that replicates itself until I can no longer
embrace it --
which leads me to wonder
about the possibility of malignant stars
madly reproducing, joining to make
enormous broods, each star,
like each malignant cell, immortal,
until en masse they overtake the galaxy.
My own billions of cells
then terrify me, make me wish I were simple
as the Milky Way, could take my place
in its clusters of chemicals and dust.Barbara F. Lefcowitz, Weber Studies, Winter 1999 ; 16(2)
Everything that will happen
a year from now
has already begun its journey ;
the seeds that will sprout into grain
for that day's bread
have already entered the ground ;
the grapes have already fermented
en route to a bottle
that a waiter will prop in an ice bucket
and bear to your table ;
the bottle's molten glass has hardened
and the water that will turn to ice
is at this moment flowing into the reservoir
from where it will enter
the appropriate cylinders and ducts.
The man who will sit at the next table
has already turned a corner
that will lead to another corner
that eventually will lead to the restaurant's door ;
he may already dream about you
though the two of you have never met
except, perhaps, a chance passing
on a metro station or noonday street.
If not already composed, the songs
that will be played at the piano bar
have imprinted their potential notes
just below the threshold.
The frontal systems that will determine
that day's weather
already loop through the atmosphere --
whether bearing a Bermuda high,
or winds so fierce
they will uproot the grain's seedlings,
rain so torrential it will drown
the man who will sit at the next table.
And the stars, the pre-determined
patterns of stars
destined to shine that night one year hence
are easily visible from tonight's window --
if we chose to forget that stars, too, collapse and die,
that whole galaxies are borne away
by expanding sheets of spacetime
in cycles no one can predict
despite precise calculation
of how their bent rays of color
will enter redshift or blueshift.Barbara F. Lefcowitz, Weber Studies, Winter 1999 ; 16(2)
Oeuvres poétiques :
- A Risk of Green (1978)
- The Wild Piano (1981)
The Queen of Lost Baggage (1986)
- Shadows and Goatbones (1992)
- Red Lies and White Lies (1994)
- The Minarets of Vienna (1996)
- A Hand of Stars (1999)
- Politics of snow : 100 new poems (2001)
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