Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Content
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction
- The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins
- The Kings of Missoula
- And the Great
- Inspiration
- Taboo against the Word Beauty, Ornithological Version on Aesthetic Theory
- Bearded Barley
- The Bowerbirds
- The Small Bang
- Dappled Things
- Fire
- Landscape
- Spare
- The Language of Pastoral
- At Buck Hall
- Pied Beauty
- A Dream of Hopkins
- A Simple Garden Ladder
- The Sleep
- Ghazal for My Selves, as Samson & Delilah
- Aubade for One Still Uncertain of Being Born
- Curtal Sonnet (with an Admonition)
- Confession to Hopkins
- Come to Me
- Hopkins in Kildare
- August Green: A Baptism
- Birds at Dawn
- The Acolyte
- To a Young Poet Resisting Hopkins
- Arrhythmia
- Goldengrove
- Date
- All Fall Long
- Strife
- The Bounds of Belief
- The Mind and Soul Growing Wide Withal
- The Horse on Zennor Hill
- The Tao of Alphabet
- Winter Mother
- My Second-Grade Teacher Reads Us Gerard Manley Hopkins
- A.M.: Her Lone Spark Dying
- Ascension
- That Necessary Evil
- The End of the Happy Hours
- One Wet Wednesday Afternoon
- By Eye-slit
- Come on the Cold
- No Fire
- Would Come Back
- River, Dissolution
- from Four Common Prayers
- Pater Noster
- Spring Again
- A Psalm of Ascents
- Poinsett's Bridge
- Reverdie
- The Telegraph Baby
- Red Kites at Tregaron
- Ark
- Saint's finger, Hill of Slane
- In the absence of a contract
- Ten Penny
- Red Bird, Black Sky
- The Tabernacle of Love
- Instructions to an Artisan
- Prayer
- The Christ-Frost
- Horse Apocalypse
- Migration Theory
- Never-Ending Birds
- Hopkins in Ireland
- Epitaph for the Journey
- Parable of the Red-Tailed Hawks
- Scoop
- What to Tell the Girl
- Finding Home by Taste, by Fire
- Winter Solstice
- Compline
- Elegy for D.S.
- Praise Song for Nikky Finney
- Coastland
- Breath and Bread
- I Waked and Fell
- Maple Gall
- Algae
- Aspen Song
- Left Behind
- Hawk in the Bronx
- The Canary
- Christ Imagined as Cavalry Commander
- October Trees
- Prayer to the Birds
- Dylan Thomas
- The Corpse Bird
- Speckled Trout
- Fall Creek
- Fossil Hunting at the Quarry
- Equinoctial
- A Question of Ear
- The Mercy Seat
- Savior
- Ornithology 101
- Oystermen
- Prayer with Fur
- Prayer with Game
- Collateral Damage
- These Fatals
- Elemental
- Via Negativa
- In Tennessee I Found a Firefly
- Knocking or Nothing
- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
- A Local Landfill's Invitation to Trash Left on the Moon
- Oil
- Ego
- Perspective
- Spouse
- Saw
- Breeze-Born
- Margaret's Reply
- Sea Journal
- The Baker Falls for Hopkins
- A Sestina for Mishima
- Ποιητική
- Meditation on the Hands of a Boy Miner
- The Acolyte
- Boy with Kite
- Jesuit Graves
- There Is a Balm in Gilead
- Michelle in Rain
- A Path through Walnut Trees after Rain
- Aubade for Yellow Jacket
- Afterword
- Contributors
Fall Creek
from The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins
- Frontmatter
- Content
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction
- The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins
- The Kings of Missoula
- And the Great
- Inspiration
- Taboo against the Word Beauty, Ornithological Version on Aesthetic Theory
- Bearded Barley
- The Bowerbirds
- The Small Bang
- Dappled Things
- Fire
- Landscape
- Spare
- The Language of Pastoral
- At Buck Hall
- Pied Beauty
- A Dream of Hopkins
- A Simple Garden Ladder
- The Sleep
- Ghazal for My Selves, as Samson & Delilah
- Aubade for One Still Uncertain of Being Born
- Curtal Sonnet (with an Admonition)
- Confession to Hopkins
- Come to Me
- Hopkins in Kildare
- August Green: A Baptism
- Birds at Dawn
- The Acolyte
- To a Young Poet Resisting Hopkins
- Arrhythmia
- Goldengrove
- Date
- All Fall Long
- Strife
- The Bounds of Belief
- The Mind and Soul Growing Wide Withal
- The Horse on Zennor Hill
- The Tao of Alphabet
- Winter Mother
- My Second-Grade Teacher Reads Us Gerard Manley Hopkins
- A.M.: Her Lone Spark Dying
- Ascension
- That Necessary Evil
- The End of the Happy Hours
- One Wet Wednesday Afternoon
- By Eye-slit
- Come on the Cold
- No Fire
- Would Come Back
- River, Dissolution
- from Four Common Prayers
- Pater Noster
- Spring Again
- A Psalm of Ascents
- Poinsett's Bridge
- Reverdie
- The Telegraph Baby
- Red Kites at Tregaron
- Ark
- Saint's finger, Hill of Slane
- In the absence of a contract
- Ten Penny
- Red Bird, Black Sky
- The Tabernacle of Love
- Instructions to an Artisan
- Prayer
- The Christ-Frost
- Horse Apocalypse
- Migration Theory
- Never-Ending Birds
- Hopkins in Ireland
- Epitaph for the Journey
- Parable of the Red-Tailed Hawks
- Scoop
- What to Tell the Girl
- Finding Home by Taste, by Fire
- Winter Solstice
- Compline
- Elegy for D.S.
- Praise Song for Nikky Finney
- Coastland
- Breath and Bread
- I Waked and Fell
- Maple Gall
- Algae
- Aspen Song
- Left Behind
- Hawk in the Bronx
- The Canary
- Christ Imagined as Cavalry Commander
- October Trees
- Prayer to the Birds
- Dylan Thomas
- The Corpse Bird
- Speckled Trout
- Fall Creek
- Fossil Hunting at the Quarry
- Equinoctial
- A Question of Ear
- The Mercy Seat
- Savior
- Ornithology 101
- Oystermen
- Prayer with Fur
- Prayer with Game
- Collateral Damage
- These Fatals
- Elemental
- Via Negativa
- In Tennessee I Found a Firefly
- Knocking or Nothing
- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
- A Local Landfill's Invitation to Trash Left on the Moon
- Oil
- Ego
- Perspective
- Spouse
- Saw
- Breeze-Born
- Margaret's Reply
- Sea Journal
- The Baker Falls for Hopkins
- A Sestina for Mishima
- Ποιητική
- Meditation on the Hands of a Boy Miner
- The Acolyte
- Boy with Kite
- Jesuit Graves
- There Is a Balm in Gilead
- Michelle in Rain
- A Path through Walnut Trees after Rain
- Aubade for Yellow Jacket
- Afterword
- Contributors
Summary
As though shedding an old skin,
Fall Creek slips free from fall's weight,
clots of leaves blackening snags,
back of pool where years ago
local lore claims clothes were shed
by a man and woman wed
less than a month, who let hoe
and plow handle slip from hands,
left rows half done, crossed dark waves
of bottomland to lie on
a bed of ferns, make a child,
and all the while the woman
stretching both arms behind her
over the bank, hands swaying
wrist-deep in current—perhaps
some old wives’ tale, water's pulse
pulsing what seed might be sown,
or just her need to let go
the world awhile, let the creek
wash away every burden
her life had carried so far,
open a room for this new
becoming as her body
flowed around her man like water.
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- Information
- The World is ChargedPoetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins, pp. 108Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2016