Translations From the Human Language
by Terry Ehret
“Terry Ehret constructs poems that are fearless. . . No matter how dark her themes, she manages to circle back . . . to reclaim new and widening patterns of light, as dark hair, antlers, corollas of oaks spring from her canvas. It is how she listens to her subjects and finds their form that ultimately stuns the reader. Like Joaquin Miller in 'The Heights,' she grips the worlds so hard she holds it in place for a few moments—and makes it shine.”
— Fran Ringold, Editor-in-Chief, Nimrod
TERRY EHRET is a teacher, mother, and writer of poems and stories. She has published four books of poetry — Suspensions (1990), Lost Body (1993), Travel/How We Go On Living (1995), Translations from the Human Language (2001)—and has just completed a novel based on the story of the fall of Troy. Among her literary awards are the National Poetry Series, California Book Award, Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, and Sonoma County Poet Laureate. Since moving to Sonoma in 1990, she has taught English at Santa Rosa Junior College, worked as an enrichment specialist in Sonoma County elementary schools through the California Poets in the Schools Program, and offered private writing classes at The Sitting Room in Cotati. In 1999, she and seven other Bay Area poets founded Sixteen Rivers Press, a shared-work publishing collective. She lives in Petaluma with her husband and daughters.
POEMS FROM Translations From the Human Language
Thirst
This year I've felt the push of antlers
thrusting out of my head.
I've leaned my head many times toward the grass, stretching
my neck to drink. This year
I've awoken from the catacombs of sleep,
my cheeks wet with spring water,
my heart beating like a river
sprung from rock.
Sometimes in the open you look up
to see a whorl of clouds, dragging and furling
your whole invented history. You look up
from where you're standing, say
among the stolid mountains,
and in that moment your life
becomes the margin
of what matters, and solid earth
you love dizzies away from you
like the wet shoreline sucked back
by that other eternity,
the sea. At times the spinning
earth shrugs you off balance,
gravity loosens its fist, hoists you into the sky,
and you might spend your life trying to recover
this nearness to flight.
