︎

Anne Waldman



forest or the rigor congruent…

for Mayra Rodriquez Castro


does the feather hieroglyph mean feather-green or is the color green floating up like a feather?







seer I seared I survived the rigorous day
the stark, stalwart one the winter
springing day
because she came
along fully to it, walked here
a calendar in hand, a bouquet of sage
she who was
sage herself, and did that
the riddled day, the riddling day



















the risen day the
obvious & 
the way
a day is fully intricate
because she is inside it













have we not met
before?
have we not engaged
the word the flowers before?
she brought the chapbook
the discernment
from other countries and crossed
a forest to meet
at agora, at stoa,







at a place of arrivals
a school of poetry she had already written
“crossroads”
what could one have felt more of
these gifts than her
herself, my Heliodora
sister, mother, child








she told me it offered
itself to the full word
to make these
words a
forest
to teach me her gait










I am saying it would be like it would
be like she said a plum
the sun dried the raw the cooked
the red shimmer of food
that is be felt as her message
it was the mysterious
preparation like a
glass of Georgian rosé
that would be in the











time of these times
that part of a
word a work, a docket patti said
off hinges off rockets, the missiles
dim the minds
and you think
again of innocents
slaughtered in their beds
arms of those
preparing a place to bed












how many languages
travelling in a head
bend down dreams of the nomad








Core Text (from Sutra)

                             for Reed Bye


What
makes
us
human?
    the
 highly
evolved
  neocortex
 of the brain and its
busy amygdala,
     our storehouse,
our storehouse
  our archive of motion’s
memory

              And the
insular  hurt

and the insular
cor  tex
seems to create a bridge

bridge

breeze

barracks

abridged

between intense emotional impulse
and how decide and act               emote


A voice
A voice
A vox
     inside  body
Inside  head
looks
    like a voice inside
cerebellum

will act
will act
will act

inside body shape of
what else but assembling here:
blood food amrita, elixir of life
voice patterns of
phenomena, see how
voice, a blue sound
a blown blue world sound

rippling off paranormal worlds

para
normal
wiles


Sounds like
sound of
one tithing
struggle of voice
                          be made
     pure sound high and clear
lone string
 the low sound of gut string
  all animals sound here 

no dark complaints
    but sounds from
gutter’s human realm
          be expelled

cleanse us here….

            in extremis ah hum








Three Poems from 13 Moons Kora
                                          for Kora Bye-Anaya
June

The yard is waiting for you
It’s somewhat spare but a good size yard
It was never a garden
It is waiting for you
You will walk and crawl and lie on the ground
and maybe it could be a garden when
you come and you will plant flowers
and have a vegetable garden
that will grow and help feed you
And we can play with the hose,
have a little swimming pool
like most kids do
This yard is waiting for you
Come soon








First Icon


When

you

arrive

& burst open
eyes

feels

like

sublime

compassion

expression

now gnosis,

  notice this?

maybe

hesitant

reluctant

strident

world

of

sorrow



How

did

I

land

here



how

may

I

Help



image of



nations

    in you



straddle borders








Kora Dreams Her Crown

Because everything has its origin
And I am going place to place from the origin.
–Maria Sabina


Tenterhooks in an experiment
Classroom gone empty
In fateful pandemic
I write “truce” with new alphabet
Forgetting “truth”
Unseated territory of Ute,
Cheyenne, Arapahoe
How far we go a century
Who reads future weather?
Keep writing from stage left
Do lessons for treatise on sleep
Invite numbers & chance op
As “seer of calculus,” as “topos abuelita”
Perhaps a wrong occasion
But spiraling
They’ll be back, please come back
The storm knocked power out
We bed down instead in another room
Mexico, estates of the Nahuatl 
Stylus and astrolabe
With soft animals, lunar moth, mastodon
Kora Bebe in charge, velvet chaplet
Sitting on haunches, equinoctial
She is always rising up
Wand, crown, her formidable beauty
Animals frightened in the rain
And texts soaking wet
What is erased is problematic
You want to cry
But rescue invisible scripture
Spiral memory, invoke telepathy
I have Memory she says
Girl Kora studies, older now
Writes between rounds
Of crystal ammunition her dream



Poet, performer, editor and activist, Anne Waldman is associated with the Beat Generation and the New York School.  She served as director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery from 1968 to 1978.  With Allen Ginsberg, she founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where she remains Artistic Director of the Summer Writing Program and guardian of its Audio/Video Literary Archive. She is the author of over 60 volumes of poetry, poetics and anthologies, including The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in The Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press) and Trickster Feminism, Manatee/Humanity and Marriage: A Sentence (Penguin). Forthcoming: an anthology, NEW WEATHERS, Poetics from the Naropa Archive, edited with Emma Gomis (Nightboat 2022), Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House 2023), and Mesopotopia (Penguin 2023).

Read next: Poetry by Elizabeth Willis
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Founded in 2020, Three Fold is an independent quarterly based in Detroit that presents exploratory points of view on arts, culture, and society in addition to original works in various media, including visual art, literature, film and the performing arts. We solicit and commission contributions from artists, writers, and activists around the world. Three Fold is a publication of Trinosophes Projects, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization located in the historic Eastern Market neighborhood in downtown Detroit. Click here to check out Three Fold’s events page and view a schedule of the publication’s on-site activities.

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