{"id":176,"date":"2026-05-07T15:15:20","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T15:15:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/helenafeder.com\/?page_id=176"},"modified":"2026-07-14T19:55:31","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T19:55:31","slug":"poetry","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/helenafeder.com\/?page_id=176","title":{"rendered":"Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A Selection of Poems<\/em><\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ecstatic Truth” in North American Review<\/em> 309.2<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ecstatic Truth 
         for Werner Herzog <\/em>

Open the bleakest realism, even 
a crack and you\u2019re at the back of 
a door we\u2019ve already stepped through. 
Skin\u2019s soft earth silts and shifts, 
tall grass drifting but not adrift. 

Eye and I, and eye and I 
brain\u2019s electricity blinks 
without knowing why there\u2019s 
something instead of nothing. 

Why the world isn\u2019t a machine, 
why words are more than things 
we hold with trembling hands.

<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Against the Grain” in North American Review<\/em>. 308.3<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Against the Grain 
          after Lucille Clifton 
<\/em>
I always wanted to be 
the kind of person who 
chops wood, assembles 
a stack to awe-strike 
termites and bring 
over those neighbors 
who never even wave 
to say, \u201cAlmost too 
pretty for the fire.\u201d 

I\u2019d know where one 
just fits to 
another, allows 
for the frayed 
edges of necessity 
by which nature 
invents art. 

Whole seasons 
of downed crepe 
myrtle and pine and 
my shiny axe 
swung high 
for gravity 
to do the work. 
That\u2019s how 
the world splits 
and splits, 
hewn orbits 
falling from 
a cutmaking hand.
 
I always wanted 
to be the kind 
of person who knew 
how to be deliberate 
and could burn 
what\u2019s beautiful.

<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat It\u2019s Like to Be a Bat\u201d in North American Review<\/em>. 308.3<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What It\u2019s Like to Be a Bat
            for Thomas Nagel<\/em>

You can\u2019t sink into inversion
or swoop the wind\u2019s bright
carnival ride. You will never
hear night\u2019s cold vortices
or taste the fecal bonds
of love and hate.
These are closed
to you, nailed shut,
laid to ground.

And whatever else
you dream or do
on earth or in
the hereafter
you\u2019ll never
make the human
a metaphor
for the bat.
<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
An earlier version of “Camouflaged” appeared in New Verse Review<\/em>. 2.4<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Camouflaged

If this were real life, 
I would come eye to eye
with a pair larger than mine 
on the back of a black 
insect, unseeing neon circles 
painted by nature 
to deter predators 

like office experiments 
enforcing honesty with a pupil 
taped to a collection jar. 
It says something like God
is always watching. Eye teeth. 

Conversely, camouflage 
hides us from others, a work 
of deception designed 
to blend in such a way 
we forget even ourselves

as in those dreams I\u2019m 
a wide winged thing circling
this fat green fig on which 
an arthropod feeds, my eyes
keener judging I can take 
the fruit and beast at once,

that these circles do not see me, 
that this neon is no poison,
that the uncanny is human, 
that no one watches above. 




<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
\u201cCloud Chamber\u201d in You Are the River.<\/em> NCMA<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cloud Chamber
        on Chris Drury's installation,<\/em>  after A.R. Ammons
   <\/em>
Down in the summer canopy
a stone grown so green you\u2019d miss 
it but for the door ajar until

you are inside: push hard
and something ancient floods
that was always waiting there: 

a deep emptiness in the dark 
solid ground a mountain cold
as in the beginning: then a nearing, 

an almost, light\u2019s softest shadow
warm as we imagine cave paintings 
by the fires that lit their way:

the leaf gardens on the walls 
flicker, float, and fade. 
Here even the air breathes.

Reach, root this thirst from
bare bracken feet to the heart
rushing in your ears,
 
offer to the chambered sky all 
your growing things like flowers  
thrown to a performance:

in this wood quiet dim
sanctuary is the light 
that lifts our skin.  

<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
An earlier version of  this poem appeared as \u201cNecessity Creates the World\u201d in ISLE.<\/em> 26.4<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Power Lines
        after Anthony Hecht<\/em>

The tallest longleaf pine, one of a pair,
was struck by lightning, a bolt that blew 
a solid bird box to inches of shrapnel

and twisted wide margins of bark 
from the top to ribbons at the base 
a strange reverse Maypole.

The man who climbed and cut it down
weeks later saw southern pine beetles
and blue-stain fungi in the wounds,

spiraling their way from points
of entry like a slow-motion hurricane
or the dusty pattern of a galaxy.

The crack was so loud that at first  
I thought a piece of an airplane 
had fallen in the yard, a wing 

downed above us by the storm 
(the tree was close to the house,
the house close to the airport).

I know it\u2019s all over for you 
but I still need you to know
what I\u2019ve learned.

Electricity, a convenient metaphor,
ranges from the tingle lifting our hairs
to School of the Americas torture.

We\u2019re addicted to it, of course,
as we are to our other, darker
power source. In Idaho I\u2019ve seen

green fields of glowing grasses 
with white turbines three times as high 
as my pine and beautiful as the lines 

of modern abstraction, of the Guggenheim.
Addiction powers ingenuity, both
cruelty and conditions for beauty.

What I must tell you is this: 
the larger the need the more
we make from it.


<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
\u201cPeeling Eggs\u201d in North American Review<\/em>. 301.4<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Peeling Eggs
 
You\u2019re afraid. I am afraid 
for you, watching your fingers 
turn too slowly trying 
not to dig into the eye. 
You want yours whole
but it need not be perfect. 
You know how to live 
 
                         but you see 
too far, past cotton wool, past
the blue expanse. You see the tear, 
how it can line and grow and spin
out of itself, spin itself out, the round 
earth of egg funneling to vortex,
a gyre of timelessness, 
a fall into space soft and ripe 
and terrible with becoming.

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A Selection of Poems “Ecstatic Truth” in North American Review 309.2 Ecstatic Truth for Werner Herzog Open the bleakest realism, even a crack and you\u2019re at the back of a door we\u2019ve already stepped through. Skin\u2019s soft earth silts and shifts, tall grass drifting but not adrift. Eye and I, and eye and I brain\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-176","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenafeder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenafeder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenafeder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenafeder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenafeder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=176"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/helenafeder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":325,"href":"https:\/\/helenafeder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/176\/revisions\/325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenafeder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}