Deena Linett
SELECTIONS FROM THE DICTIONARY OF CONGERIES
Other definitions: see under The Madwoman’s Word-Book in Reference, non-circulating
Wind:
Also “currents.” Movement of ideas through space
Examples include such things as telescopes:
inventions and conceptual changes in various
locations, sometimes on various continents, which
seem to have been developed at the same time: see
also “synchronicity”
Presence made available by sensations on skin,
pleasurable (in which case, breeze), or punishing (stinging,
bitter). For stormy: see below; or made visible by the
presence of obstructions in a variety of forms and
weights: consider trees bending, their leaves; buildings.
Structural openings in bridges. Wide meadows, the
grasses like fields of water. The historic experience of
wind can be read in reaches of fields, steep and stony or
tranquil
Cloud:
Glass in its imagined liquid state, slowed and (sometimes)
tinted
Commentary:
Once upon a time
there was a woman
who spent her youth
pushing clouds into formal arrangements
she found pleasing, or perhaps useful.
When she was old
she no longer had the strength
– for clouds are heavy,
or perhaps they resisted –
but she was used to heights,
needed them, so she ascended
redwood trees, and from them
learned to hear the stories
leaves told.
You may
wish to continue this entry . . .
The Cloud Manager
Stones:
While commonly and correctly understood to be evidence
of Earth’s history, stones are also friends in disguise
1. [See “Each Day a Sacrament”, The Gate at Visby, 45]
2. [See Making Certain It Goes On, 425, et seq.]
3. Tell a story about how a stone surprised or helped you
Time:
1. An infinite extension or array of tiny beads of colorful sub-
microscopic material like glass, organic and
indestructible [as atoms were said to be, before the last
century], textured and in combinations beyond
our present capacity to understand
2. An intricately woven silk ribbon, variously red or yellow,
which unreels before the examiner as she ages
Tell a story in which there is no time
The Sea:
home to countless biomorphs, the liquid sea is made
from the emotions of human beings who live
within 80 miles of a substantial body of water,
or who have once visited and tasted a sea
It is not necessary for them to have gone out onto it
in a vessel of any sort (though that is desirable)
Make up a story about how the sea is colored
by one of the strong feelings you have experienced
Mind:
Because some of us are largely uncomfortable
with mystery, we call this faculty “mind”
It is the stuff of which its nature tells us
how much is ungoverned and how acts erupt
into the world, surprising us, how much breaks
into consciousness, awakes
Storm:
Storms vary depending on geography and conditions:
Some come in on sheets – or draperies – of black
cloud, and some in sunlight. Many bear
lightning and great noise, and some come onto land
from bodies of water in funnel-shaped spouts. Others
are circular: their winds can destroy houses;
these are called hurricanes or typhoons, depending
on where they occur. Drifts of soft rain are
called showers, or smirr, and streaks of hard rain
mixed with stinging bits of ice sometimes occur.
In cold climates frozen water in various intensities
happens; these are called by a variety of particular and
local names
Name your local ice-or-snow. If you live in a warm place
name your rains. Other possibilities:
Make an object or picture of your storms
Occasionally you can find an object in your travels
like a little glass paperweight from Belfast with a storm
inside
Mistake:
His voice on the answering machine erased,
the error immediately realized, little shock
and in its place a tick of the vast emptiness
all these small mistakes, losses, familiar
as daylight, go into other states
of awareness – or being – as ice to water,
water to steam, grief to images, one of which
may be cloudshadow moving across hills
Mythos:
The permanent beauty of story
Skull:
1. A small boat with many rowers used for exercise
or competition
2. A pierced bony cage for the thinking apparatus
or material; consider its analog, the ribs:
cage for the breathing machinery and heart
Copyright Deena Linett 2015
Deena Linett’s third and most recent collection is The Gate at Visby (Tiger Bark Press 2012). Her first book, Rare Earths (BOA Editions, 2001), is composed of fictive letters from women on St Kilda and the outer isles over 250 years, and came into being during the first of two fellowships to Hawthornden Castle, Scotland. She is currently at work on a volume of New & Selected poems. She has also had two fellowships to Yaddo, and one to The Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators on Gotland.