by Ailish Hopper

Love of the Abstract

Better to stay close

to the system.
To love patterns,

over particulars.

Kaleidoscope
of tints and hues,

still in

their tubes of paint.

Why I Am Not a Printing Press

Parked like 1950‘s cars,
showroom glass
between us,

in carmine dusk
or cobalt gleam finish,

a long way from goose quills, sharpened
with pen knife,

wetted, dabbed
in bovine horns, or ink blots.

The man next to me points
and says, in awe, Thatﾕs a bad
pen. And I agree,

imagining from my hand
the Yours truly,

the Sincerely,

the Fondly. And so on
across the mental pages,

Hopefully,

Expectantly,

On a cloudy Saturday, everywhere I travel,
you are not there,

I am,

---

Ailish Hopper was educated at Princeton University and received her MFA from Bennington College, where she was the 1998 Jane Kenyon Scholar. Other recent poems of hers are forthcoming in Poetry, Many Mountains Moving, and a special issue of the Japanese journal Poetry Kanto on emerging American poets. She was nominated by Jane Hirshfield for the Mary Roberts Rinehart Prize for a book in progress, and currently teaches at Goucher College in Maryland.


ReVision – A Journal of Consciousness and Transformation
Spring 2002 Volume 24, Number 4
Reprinted with permission of the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation.
Published by Heldref Publications, 1319 18th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036-1802. http://www.heldref.org/html/rev.html
Copyright ｩ 2002