#sarah howe

[contremineur]

all the birds have come to this bancal on the high path between Sóller and Deia built stone on stone by Moors a thousand years ago for olives, oranges and carob in February they are feeding the fires and flames catch the leaves and blaze almost to the arms of the man who settles the twigs it could be my father who still makes fire run through things but here they are remaking the old cutting and burning the ripe wood leaving young shoots on gnarled trunks the voice of the chainsaw echoes in valleys smoke hangs high and drifts the terraces are held against the mountain by the dead and the living their hands their muscles the salt of their skin at dusk the mountains shift to grey layers of rock are smoke and mist and the sound of the chainsaw stops just this spade and this pick scraping making the little difference and underfoot the cloudy cyclamen and by the side the dark-leaved aromatic myrtle

Sarah Howe, Underfoot

Another one cut and pasted (or laboriously typed out) in my virtual commonplace book years ago – any thoughts on source or better credits much appreciated...

[cor-ardens-archive]

Think how Antigone, in the play that really belongs to her father, is revealed to live in a riddle of genealogy. Or her unlikely latterday incarnation in the plot of Polanski’s grainy, neo-noir LA: Faye Dunaway’s fur-draped, ill-fated femme, when confronted by the raging private detective who is Jack Nicholson and who loves her takes each of his slaps – her cheek, then her other cheek, then the first, and again, and again – until she can barely speak those two words that sound at first like polarities, until we realise, terribly, with him, the special violence done to her, and to language’s taxonomies – that it is possible, though we have no word, to be someone’s sister and mother. Cursed offspring of a riddled, blinded Theban king, left to die in the desert, between human and beast.

Sarah Howe, from Loop of Jade

[thanatophobia-thoughts]

When we wake up brushed by panic in the dark our pupils grope for the shape of things we know. Photons loosed from slits like greyhounds at the track reveal light’s doubleness in their cast shadows that stripe a dimmed lab’s wall—particles no more— and with a wave bid all certainties goodbye. For what’s sure in a universe that dopplers away like a siren’s midnight cry? They say a flash seen from on and off a hurtling train will explain why time dilates like a perfect afternoon; predicts black holes where parallel lines will meet, whose stark horizon even starlight, bent in its tracks, can’t resist. If we can think this far, might not our eyes adjust to the dark?

Sarah Howe

For Stephen Hawking

[shakespearenews]

The No. 1 Ladies’ Defrauding Agency

What a 19th-century scammer can teach us about women, lying, and economic boom-and-bust cycles

Nevertheless, as soon as she was caught, a backstory for Howe emerged in the papers. The Boston Herald published a story with the headline “Mrs. Howe’s Unsavory Record,” claiming she was born out of wedlock and ran away at 15 to marry an “Indian physician,” who they also referred to as “her dark-skinned Othello.” The paper claimed the marriage caused her mother such distress that she wound up dying in an asylum “raving over the heartlessness of her daughter.” 

[gwydionmisha]

The No. 1 Ladies’ Defrauding Agency

What a 19th-century scammer can teach us about women, lying, and economic boom-and-bust cycles

[tinyghosthands]

Sarah Howe

[sakurabreeze]

A Painting

I watched the turquoise pastel melt between your fingerpads; how later you flayed the waxen surface back to the sunflower patch of a forethought, your instrument an upturned brush, flaked to the grain – the fusty sugar paper buckled. You upended everything, always careless of things: finest sables splayed under their own weight, weeks forgotten – to emerge gunged, from the silted floor of a chemical jamjar. I tidied, like a verger or prefect, purging with the stream from the oil- fingered tap. Stop, you said, printing my elbow with a rusty index, pointing past an ancient meal’s craquelured dish to the oyster-crust at the edge of an unscraped palette – chewy rainbow, blistered jewels.

[lifeinpoetry]

Maybe holding back is just another kind

of need. I am a blue plum in the half-light.

You are a tiger who eats his own paws.

The day we married all the trees trembled

as if they were mad — be kind to me, you said.

— Sarah Howe, “Frenzied,” Loop of Jade