Lisa Rosenberg
Lisa Rosenberg’s debut poetry collection, A Different Physics, has been awarded the Red Mountain Poetry Prize, and is forthcoming in 2018. Rosenberg is the second Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, California. She holds degrees in Physics and Creative Writing, and received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry from Stanford University. She worked for many years in engineering, founded a marketing consulting practice, and flew as a private pilot. Her poems appear in The Threepenny Review, Poetry, Witness, Poetry Daily, Southwest Review, The POETRY Anthology: 1912-2002, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area.
To the Makers
I want to tell them, all of them, the living
and the dead. Not about gratitude. I want
them to know. To tell them that it happens,
years or ages after their labors. It happens
with their work in my hand, on a bowed page,
at or near the end of a phrase. A fissure
opens onto the deep lake of their making,
its slate skin and forested rim. Tools strewn
on the silty bottom: wavering shapes, soft
with life along grooves and shanks. Through this
water, through murk and sun-shaft and clear shoals
the pressure building or falling off, they dove
and rose, time and again. Hauling, gleaning,
and leaving the lake, to make a portal from words.
Left Coast Triptych
1.
In a dusk of lavenders,
the crescent
of an incomplete overpass
on three dark pillars
of concrete.
The space between
admits the sintered lights
of Los Angeles,
cataclysmic downtown.
This could become
our Stonehenge,
a future ruin
as mute or fertile
as the pieces of Rome.
Gigantic ornament,
brocade of belts,
the interweaving
cloverleaves.
2.
No ramparts.
Just the transverse ranges
and coastal cliffs.
No stone chateaux
to predate remnants
of clay presidios.
What possible
likeness in Venice?
Abandoned canals
fraught with light
below the streets’
white noise.
Lone obelisk
of a graffiti’d lamppost.
And long monuments
in rock-bed, shifting
like the fictions
that claim us.
3.
We rest in the shade
of imported flora.
The sky is a speechless,
sun-struck god
and all our languages
to praise it are foreign.
The angels’ city
overflows into valleys
named for saints.
A renaissance novel
promised griffins
and gold: an island
to the right hand
of the Indies,
where a Queen Califía
sang to her tribes
before horses,
highways or mines.