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A Human of Mars, 36

Lyn Hejinian

1941 –

2024

Arise, rice: I tend a rose: a rose and I.
Reality is composed, uncomposed, composed: no ant for itself, beetle through compost, king/queen on the heap: reality ahop.
Cherry trees without me and I without a kumquat tree.
Now other things must be acknowledged: a magnificent black mare, a crow of many trades, a white and orange kitten who knows all the songs and is a first class mimic, a peach, a flea, a good credit rating, the google map app.
The riddle persists: who am I?

Lyn Hejinian was born in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1941. Poet, essayist, and translator, she authored and coauthored several books of poetry, most recently Tribunal (Omnidawn Publishing, 2019). She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2006-2012. She taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a professor and John F. Hotchkis Chair Emerita, and lived in Berkeley until her death.

Themes

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More by this poet

Ring Burial, 34

Anti-determinative, interminable, incomplete—the poem has nothing to do with truth or value.
This poem, for example, is philosophical, in that it doesn't seek things to believe but things not to believe.
Every sentence records a stretch of becoming invented as it goes.
It's decontextualization, rather than discontinuation, that time effects.

Lyn Hejinian

2019

Time of Tyranny, 50

Birds hatch, eggs are laid, nests are built, trees branch, seeds
sprout: it’s always time. Time to recognize the sipping
self as girded shelf supporting stuff conducive to supporting self
recognizing time making its attempt to install
itself with all its belongings. They include forebodings
and long descriptions of the rifle butts that press
against the past shouldered by the men of firing squads
and the verminous skin of dogs with mange even at a very young

Lyn Hejinian

2019

Time of Tyranny, 49

We live in toppled times under a feat of tyranny; let’s not
fake getting lost, let’s do it, let’s not do it intermittently, let’s be
lost, disoriented and never to be bound so all can hear
the hiss of the adverbs we shoot into tyrants’ eyes, quivering
shafts slippery from limbs and aimed by eyes under feathered
lids. Our features are like stale bread, my headache bad

Lyn Hejinian

2019

Poems

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A Human of Mars, 36

More by this poet

Ring Burial, 34

Time of Tyranny, 50

Time of Tyranny, 49

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