This is Michael Carey for Voices from the Prairie a weekly sampling from the rich soil of Iowa’s literary tradition. Today’s poem is "To a Friend Going Blind" by the Pulitzer prizing winning poet from Iowa City Jorie Graham. It is a tender poem to a suffering friend concerning limits, concerning the boundaries of the world that we find ourselves in, that help give it shape, and that no affliction can erase.
Today, because I couldn’t find
the shortcut through,
I had to walk this town’s entire inner
perimeter to find
where the medieval walls break open
in an eighteenth century
arch. The yellow valley flickered on and off
through cracks and the gaps
for guns. Bruna is teaching me
to cut a pattern.
Saturdays we buy the cloth.
She takes it in her hands
like a good idea, feeling
for texture, grain, the built-in
limits. It’s only as an afterthought she asks
and do you think it’s beautiful?
Her measuring tapes hang down, corn-blond and endless,
from her neck.
When I look at her
I think Rapunzel,
how one could climb that measuring,
that love. But I was saying,
I wandered all along the street that hugs the walls,
a needle floating
on its cloth. Once
I shut my eyes and felt my way
along the stone. Outside
is the cashcrop, sunflowers, as far as one can see. Listen,
the wind rattles in them,
a loose worship
seeking an object,
an interruption. Sara,
the walls are beautiful. They block the view.
And it feels rich to be
inside their grasp.
When Bruna finishes her dress
it is the shape of what has come
to rescue her. She puts it on.
"To A Friend Going Blind" by Jorie Graham from her book Erosion published by Princeton University Press.
For Voices from the Prairie and Humanities Iowa, this is Michael Carey hoping you continue to hear the music blooming all around you.
Biography
Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950. She attended New York University as an undergraduate and received an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Swarm (Ecco Press, 2000); The Errancy (1997); The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Materialism (1993); Region of Unlikeness (1991); The End of Beauty (1987); Erosion (1983); and Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980). She has also edited two anthologies, Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language (1996) and The Best American Poetry 1990. Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 1997.