Inspired by Danika Stegman and Nate Logan’s collaborative cento-by-USPS, and amid health and other difficulties, we created this cento together in 2024. We wrote it slowly by hand, one line at a time, by mailing it back and forth to each other between La Crosse, Wisconsin, and New Orleans, Louisiana. It is an artifact of those months – of weather, work, mail speed, reading habits, travel, and illness – and of our desire to find a way to care for one another across long months and miles and to bring that care forward creatively.
Postal Cento
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread / On the blue surface of thine aëry surge, / Like the bright hair uplifted from the head / Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge / Of the horizon to the zenith’s height, / The locks of the approaching storm.
What does the storm set free?
I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.
Wondrous it was. At intervals light-struck.
Hope is like that: sometimes a sunken stone, sometimes a silver maple leaf slipping across currents, sometimes a mallard rising fast and jewel-like in the morning, another drop in the great watershed of things.
Each of us comes from somewhere with blossoms.
Do your roots drag up colour from the sand?
I pulled, with hot tongs, a whole / orchid from the air.
You who do not remember / passage from the other world / I tell you I could speak again: whatever / returns from oblivion returns / to find a voice:
It begins with a word as small as the cry of Athena’s owl.
‘Eustatic’ is the word, meaning ‘relating to sea level change. / . . .’ Bear in mind, though I’m leaving you / cast up on daybreak’s strand / I’ll be back ere long to scatter you – / till then, let sunshine bathe your skin: / there’s more days past than ahead of you / – now you can begin.
here it is now, carrying its North / Atlantic windfall, hissing Consider / the body of the ocean which rises every instant into / me
It may be that in all her phrases stirred / The grinding water and the gasping wind; / But it was she and not the sea we heard.
The devotional fervor-work of revision.
Be quaint explosive.
It is lonesome, yes. For we are the last of the loud.
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs!
–Look! How the sidewalk gardens blaze!–
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, / I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
I am full throated and calling.
I know that / hope is the hardest / love we carry.
Source poems include: Benjamin Cutter, “An Invitation to Light”; Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”; Tracy K. Smith, “The Speed of Belief”; Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”; Jorie Graham, “Exchange”; Stephen Siperstein, “The Work Ahead”; Victoria Chang, “Today”; H. D. “Sea Iris”; Kiki Petrosino, “Souvenir”; Louise Glück, “The Wild Iris”; Carolyn Forché, “Charmolypi”; Kathleen Jamie, “Prologue” and “The Night Wind”; Jorie Graham, “Sea Change”; Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West”; Natalie Diaz, “Snake Light”; Patricia Smith, “To Little Black Girls, Risking Flower”; Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Second Sermon on the Warpland”; Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”; Carolyn Hembree, “For Today”; William Butler Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”; Donika Kelly, “Red Bird”; Jane Hirshfield, “Hope and Love.”
