Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Law of the Unforeseen
    The Law of the Unforeseen
    The Law of the Unforeseen
    Ebook118 pages57 minutes

    The Law of the Unforeseen

    By Edward Harkness

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    In The Law of the Unforeseen, the law Harkness speaks of requires us to know now and then. We walk under “the trees of unremembrance,” so that we may know who we are, how we got here, and who we came from. And we arrive in this lovely and threatened paradise called Earth, right now. The “endless replication of clam shells, ants, / hyacinths in spring”?—it’s true, we will lose those things, individually, but these poems savor such stuff, and in that savoring they give us hope for the future.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press
    Release dateMar 4, 2020
    ISBN9780912887777
    The Law of the Unforeseen

    Read more from Edward Harkness

    Related to The Law of the Unforeseen

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Same River Twice

      Feb 3, 2022

      Same River Twice
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Five Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      The painting is of a door, its wood so warpedwith moisture it cannot close. It stays ajar leaving a sliver of light—enough to suggestsomething sweet and almost unreachable behind the door—and you sit in yourroom working on the bills or those comforti

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Body Language

      Aug 14, 2019

      Body Language
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Bard In The Woods

      Nov 30, 2020

      Bard In The Woods
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      It’s Come to This

      Sep 1, 2021

      It’s Come to This
      16 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Four Poems

      Mar 1, 2024

      I was trying to look a little less like myselfand more like other humans, humans who belonged, so I put on a skort.Purchased in another life, when I had a husband and wrote thank-you notes and held dinner parties,the skort even had its own little poc

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Any Given Day

      Mar 29, 2021

      Any Given Day
      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Sensualiterature

      Mar 29, 2021

      BRIAN DOYLE (1957–2017) was the longtime editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland and the author of many books of essays and fiction, most notably the novels Mink River and Martin Marten. ONE OF THE THINGS that we do not talk about w

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Four Poems

      Nov 1, 2019

      Four Poems
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems

      Nov 1, 2024

      It was the summer the alewife ran aground earlyand the summer before they closedthe beaches at dusk. It was the summer after thechild nearly drowned in the quiet waters beyond the first sandbar, and it was the summer Ilost my favorite necklace to the

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Mountain Time

      Jan 1, 2021

      In the air you don’t know who you are or where My own self feels it is in wind being born These are currents a man made one eighth of smokeless fire fears but chooses A path south from Anchorage to a Mountain House Ungovern the northern land to pass

      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Wide Open

      May 7, 2020

      Wide Open
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Maybe It Won’t Be That Bad

      Dec 9, 2019

      Maybe It Won’t Be That Bad
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Fragrant

      Jan 18, 2022

      Fragrant
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Seven Poems

      May 1, 2022

      Seven Poems
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Must-Read Poetry: September 2017

      Sep 11, 2017

      Isn’t that one of the purest goals of poetry—to justify our breaths? To recognize that we matter? The post Must-Read Poetry: September 2017 appeared first on The Millions.

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Stop Hating on Adjectives!

      Jun 12, 2019

      A common admonition in creative writing pedagogy is, “Cut as many adjectives as possible.” I propose that this rule springs from mere prejudice. The post Stop Hating on Adjectives! appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

      Dec 15, 2017

      The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Scent Of The Past

      Feb 2, 2023

      A Scent Of The Past
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Competition

      Jul 27, 2022

      IN COMPETITION NO 282 you were invited to write a poem with the title Unpacking. Basil Ransome-Davies, in a poem on the wars between sonic (pretty-sounding) and confessional poets, made me laugh with the couplet ‘Confessionals unpack their hearts, /

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Apparition

      Mar 26, 2020

      Apparition
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Plague Legends

      Dec 1, 2021

      The Plague Legends
      12 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      From: “Gravity Archives”

      Sep 3, 2024

      1. Jetlagged visitor in London dark awry with first light catastrophic: tender welts and bruises, smears of iodine, bare bones scraped fleshless, fallen anyhow. What disaster fell and welters out of sight? But day distracts. Cold tube train wheels sq

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Until The Sea Closed Over Us And The Light Was Gone

      Jul 1, 2020

      —Dante, Canto XXVI But if the truth is dreamed of toward the morning—El Paso Although it was really last summer’s song,all this summer Despacito played on as slower then I turned myself to gazeupon Juarez. The summer everything hurts my eyes, a dozen

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Five Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      Five Poems
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Wide Open Wordsmiths

      May 5, 2022

      Wide Open Wordsmiths
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Six Poems

      Feb 28, 2023

      Dear C, At first Virgil’s poem is quite dull; equivocalnames of products at The Container Store: Elfa White Medium Drawer, Mesh NarrowRolling Cart (Medium Solution), Narrow Classic Mesh Box and the number of pirouetting starseach product attained. An

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Five Poems

      Sep 1, 2022

      At first these poems were their own sweetfurlough or as Basquiat did it the reflexiveopening of a new personal phase for mealone that many have traveled beforebut never together a phrase too busy to sitand be spoken that awakens to the recurringwave

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Law of the Unforeseen

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Law of the Unforeseen - Edward Harkness

      promise.

      One: Great Apes at the Zoo

      Oh, when they heard that Louis was dead,

      All the people, they dressed in red.

      The angels laid him away.

      ~From the song Louis Collins, by Mississippi John Hurt

      THREE ITALIAN PRUNES

      roll off my desk at work, and of course

      I must ponder this inconsequential event,

      as if adhering to it grants it eternal life,

      and damn, they’re bruised and bleeding now

      in my hand. I look at them as Newton did

      his famous apple, also bruised, no doubt,

      but a bruise that led to the glue of the universe,

      a world that pulls us toward its heart,

      which is good and bad, good in that

      we don’t float through life as anemones do

      in the starless deeps. Bad in that we’re magnetized,

      tethered to the three dimensions,

      always feeling about for the fourth or fifth

      key ring to the beyond. I pick a scab

      of purple prune skin from my teeth.

      In truth, there are no dimensions.

      There’s merely now, my cluttered desk

      with its pens and sandwich wrappers,

      and an 1886 edition of Berens’ Hand-Book

      of Mythology: Myths and Legends of Greece and Rome,

      in remarkably good condition considering its age,

      owned once upon a time by a young scholar.

      On the inside cover she has floridly fountain-penned

      her name, Amelia, notes she’s 17, boarding

      at something-or-other academy in Charleston.

      She likes Athene, has scrawled Athene here and twice

      on the secret back inside cover. Amelia has,

      I discover, underlined a passage: "Pallas-Athene,

      goddess of Wisdom and Armed Resistance....

      is the only divinity whose authority was equal

      to that of her father, Zeus himself."

      As for the prunes, I ate them, they were delicious,

      so sweet and so cold. As for Berens, he writes

      with the clarity of the stream into which Narcissus gazed.

      As for Amelia, her secret is an open book.

      She’s fallen hard for the goddess of Wisdom

      and Armed Resistance, the two of them

      now married to the scintillant dust of eternity.

      ~With apologies to WC Williams and EM Behrens

      COMING TO TERMS WITH THE FACT THAT I MAY NEVER GET THE HANG OF MISSISSIPPI JOHN HURT’S MONDAY MORNING BLUES

      I said it and life goes on.

      It’s not just the complicated 6/8 time,

      or the continuous alternating bass.

      And it’s not the smooth-as-a-baby’s-butt

      slides from the 3rd fret to the 5th,

      and the instantaneous requirement

      of the left-hand fingers that they leap

      from the barred A-chord to the 5th fret D,

      or the two-step dance of the right thumb

      thumping the thick baritone E-string,

      or even the jump back to A and a rather

      eccentric little duet you do

      with your left pinky and ring finger

      to make an A-sharp major diminished,

      or whatever in God’s name Hurt does there

      to resolve the dissonance and settle back

      into the barred A. Nor would I say

      it’s the slurring of certain notes,

      the hammer-offs and hammer-ons

      scattered variously throughout the ragged

      bluesy but up-tempo wizardry on the 1965

      recording I have, now so scratched

      as to be almost unplayable. And it’s not as if

      my no-longer-nimble fingers

      refuse to hop and skip gymnastically

      up and down the fret board, as they once did.

      It’s the damn song—that’s what trips me.

      It’s the blues of Monday morning,

      you feel around for your shoes—gone—

      and you realize you’re in jail,

      you don’t know why, nobody does—

      in jail, you realize, for six long weeks today,

      so goes the song. Tomorrow’s your trial day.

      What might be my fine, you’re wondering.

      Can’t be too much, can it?

      Then the trial, you’ve played the song

      over and over, nobody cares how many hours

      you’ve put in, you yourself don’t care,

      you just like to play, but the jury says guilty,

      the judge says Get a pick and shovel,

      let’s go down in the mine. That’s the only time,

      that’s the only time, that’s the only time,

      you ever felt like crying. Mister,

      change a dollar and give me a lucky dime.

      Jail or mine—there’s no escape, none,

      except by playing again and again

      Hurt’s simple, wickedly difficult tune

      with your forever tender fingertips

      raw from pressing the steel wires—

      except by singing your way,

      no matter how badly,

      through the secret air duct of music.

      CLEARING BRUSH

      I’d fallen asleep in the snow. Waking,

      a thin coverlet slid off my poncho.

      There lay the handle of my machete,

      long as my forearm, its dented blue blade

      already stained with rust, blade and forearm

      put to the test that winter to clear brush.

      I rose and re-entered my sodden life,

      the one I’d just left, the one on a bluff

      above the beach where on clear days you’d see

      the blue Olympic Range across the Sound.

      If the tide was slack, the Sound flat as glass,

      you’d

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1