Leaf by Rosalind Pace
Rosalind Pace gave a wonderful spotlight reading at the Cape Cod Poetry Group’s July, 2015 Poetry & Music Event at the Truro Library. It’s a great pleasure to select one of her poems for inclusion in this series. I admire the skillful use of line and stanza breaks in ‘Leaf’, the elegant phrasing and creative use of image and metaphor, the poem’s continually deepening emotional undertow. There is always great authority in her voice – she wants you to understand and feel what’s on her mind. And you do.
And congratulations are in order! Rosalind has been awarded a 2016 Poetry Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. There were 342 entries in the poetry competition.
– Barry Hellman
Cape Cod Poetry Group
Leaf
I hold
this leaf as if it were now
a stiff brown blanket
wrapped around
a breath of past summer’s air
My father
also had dark veins
and mottled skin
as he curled into
his final sleep
his hands
clutched.
The stem of this leaf
ends in a point
of delicate attachment.
I could toss it
I could crush it
it would become
indistinguishable
from dirt but I don’t
O how could I make
a proper grave
for this one dead thing
among so many others
I repeat the word
until the sound becomes
as brittle as its body.
Leaf, leaf, leaves, leaving:
what trees and fathers do.
Nimrod International Journal, fall/winter 2013
Semi-finalist in the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry
Rosalind Pace’s poems have appeared most recently in Atlanta Review (International Publication Prize), Passager (Honorable Mention), upstreet, and Nimrod International Journal (Awards 35 issue). Other publications include American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Three Rivers Poetry Review, Ontario Review, and others.
She had a long and stimulating career as a Poet-in-the-Schools, including Writer-in-Residence at the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School from its inception to her retirement in 2009. Now she teaches Memoirs at the Truro Council on Aging; in March she will offer her Poetry Seminar at the Wellfleet Library- for the tenth year), and this summer (July 18-22) she and Marcia Simon will offer Image-Making: Discover Your Voice and Vision, At Provincetown Art Association & Museum. They have been teaching this workshop for almost forty years.
Rosalind is also a visual artist- and has exhibited her paintings and collages in various venues since the early 1970s. She was a member of the original Group Gallery in Provincetown. She is grateful for her many poetry mentors: Alan Dugan, Gerald Stern, Alan Feldman, Mark Doty, Dorianne Laux, Joe Millar, and Tony Hoagland, as well as the poetry group that meets every week at her house, and the summer poetry group that meets in August.
Poet’s Comment: I wrote this poem in a workshop at Castle Hill given by Dorianne Laux and Joe Millar. The prompt was to go outside and find something, anything, bring it in and write a poem about it. So I did. I picked up a dead leaf. Then began by describing it. The connection to my father came suddenly and then relentlessly.
It wasn’t about a metaphor so much as it was about a fusion- the kind that happens when every fiber of one’s being becomes transformed into a poem/ knowledge and intuition fused, and then the slow work of honing what you know is the essential poem.
From my long years of teaching Image-Making, which is about the creative process, I know that a choice is true when it is intuitive rather than preconceived. I picked up the leaf because I liked it, and there were so many it was fun to choose just one. So there it is.
