Photo by Peter Lamont

Consider the photo of the author skiing in Taos (where she works as a ski instructor when she’s not writing and teaching writing) and then consider the first lines of the first poem—

When we pause at the near edge

of memory or invention and elect

not to venture further, we fail…

—and keep these in mind as you read through this gorgeous selection of poems by an author/skier who, in her maturity, has allowed herself to go over some visionary edge and both lament and glorify the universal desire for being and presence (read “desire” as absence—oh, my goodness, that beautiful lost turquoise metaphor in the first poem and the image later on of the author looking in at the village windows). Leslie Ullman manages to make the cosmic intimate and personal and vice versa. It’s breathtaking to see a poet writing at this level of daring, elegance, and mastery.

Leslie Ullman is a prize-winning poet, friend, colleague (at Vermont College of Fine Arts) and ski instructor (in Taos). Also a graceful, intelligent presence whenever she is around. She is Professor Emerita at University Texas-El Paso, where she taught for 25 years and started the Bilingual MFA Program. She has published three poetry collections: Natural Histories, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1979; Dreams by No One’s Daughter, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987; and Slow Work Through Sand, co-winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, University of Iowa Press, 1998. Individual poems have appeared in numerous magazine, including Poetry Magazine, The New Yorker, Arts & Letters, and Poet Lore. Her essays have been published in Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, The AWP Writer’s Chronicle, and Numéro Cinq.

—dg

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Consider Desire: Poems

By Leslie Ullman

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CONSIDER DESIRE

When we pause at the near edge

of memory or invention and elect

not to venture further, we fail

to consider that invisible journeys, too,

leave dried mud and grass on our shoes;

that one can dream of waltzing with

a stranger, following every

subtle lead, and wake up happy

or be consoled by a fragrant loaf

mentioned briefly in a poem.

The vast bowl of the desert once held

an ocean we can borrow any time

we cup our minds around it like hands

around spinning clay. Once, I halted

on a winter street when I noticed the turquoise

stone had slipped from the center of my ring.

I reversed my steps and searched for hours,

peering downward for a bit of sky,

seeing every crevice in the dark pavement

for the first time, every sodden leaf

and twig. I fingered the empty bezel, sky

filling my mind. Luminous. Parachute of blue.

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ALMOST LISTENING

Not revelation shot from the hip

by Fresh-schooled Mind practicing its aim

on the future, or fact Administrative

Mind wields like a mallet, never waiting

to see what wing-fragile contours

it might settle around, never accepting or

offering it like a handful of water that holds

its shape even as some leaks between the fingers

the truth, as incipience,

is rarely allowed to slip into the ear of

someone in the street talking rapidly into

an invisible phone as though talking to himself

or to settle beside him in the airport lounge

as he taps money and one-liners into

his keyboard; is rarely glimpsed sideways by

the young mother rushing in shoes that pinch,

after hours of setting plates before others, through a haze

of fumes towards the aluminum glare of the bus

she may miss; is rarely allowed presence

like a word thought before it is spoken

or a note that is less sound than an exhalation

riding the air from another latitude

long after it has signaled, from a burnished

gong, the end of a ritual meditation

or like the thick fur of an animal almost camouflaged

amid dark trees on a moonless night,

a large animal believed to be dangerous

when removed from his world, or when his world

is altered by our presence in it.

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DON’T SLEEP YET

This is what you’ve longed for,

drops tapping the shingles

and the silent flowering of each word

printed on the page before you.

Water pours off the eaves and drips

on the dead leaves outside, and you

are held, held the way wood and glass

were meant to hold you. Keep

the rain. You need the privacy

tomorrow will shred to bits. Blue

rain. Streaked wind. The lamp

pulling the room around it. The book

pulling your life around it. The rain

is trying to tell you a story

of going outside and

coming back in.

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THE STORY I NEED

…………–after a line by Ricardo Molinari

Ah, if only the village were so small

and I could look into others’ windows by

looking into my own cupped hands

to see what steams on their

plates, or read the spines of books

on their shelves, all those lives

to open one at a time, I might hold

the history of civilization a little closer

to my own small history—bread

passed down from the centuries, leather boots

on flagstone, couples’ first words

in the morning—not for the privacies

but as proof of the way buildings hold the countless

small movements of words and bodies

through space, and for the feeling

that I, too, am drying the cups and putting them away

or sitting at the tavern, a chessboard

open between me and the oldest inhabitant

or joining a family at their picnic on the green,

unable to distinguish myself from

the murmuring parents and noisy siblings

gathered around the cheese and pears

they have chosen, in a world

of possibilities, to set on the bright cloth.

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—Leslie Ullman

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