JENNIFER J. RANKIN of Beecroft, Australia is the author of Earth Hold.   Her poems have been published in Aspect, The North American     Review, Poetry Australia, and elsewhere

Rankin, Jennifer J.

English

University of San Francisco

Ontario ReviewVolume 12 Spring-Summer 1980 Article 11December 2014This Is How It HappensJennifer J. RankinFollow this and additional works at: http://repository.usfca.edu/ontarioreviewPart of the Poetry CommonsFor more information, please contact southerr@usfca.edu.Recommended CitationRankin, Jennifer J. (2014) "This Is How It Happens," Ontario Review: Vol. 12, Article 11.Available at: http://repository.usfca.edu/ontarioreview/vol12/iss1/11This Is How It Happens JENNIFER J. RANKIN This is how it happens. First the sun breaks refracting where it touches that small shrub, the interstices of this leaf, dust on the surface of hair scattering this world entering the silence. There are moments of placing hands on a table and children entering the house. There is the gap between the calling and answering of birds there is fable, and there is the thin distance of two old trees. Then words. Mumbling refrains rising and falling in this same room shuffling apart into meaning and back again. Then there are letters. Wispy black strokes on fine crinkled airpaper. Offerings of time and place. Towards the end three poems come like letters. Towards the end, like prayers. This is how it happens, believe me. This is the healing of the spirit. 51 Published by USF Scholarship: a digital repository @ Gleeson Library | Geschke Center, 2014Friends appear. Thresholds are weighted with faces straining oddly with newness harsh almost, these faces, branded with this first time this untried reaching out of the hitherto. Unpeeling habits we stutter standing like this in the doorway. Stammer against memory! Stammer against mist! and I ask myself, why are they here? knowing as I know the lack of what has gone before when the emptiness was unfilled even with silence but as I look at these faces I see my own unknowing and this lack of understanding becomes its own numb beckoning. 52 http://repository.usfca.edu/ontarioreview/vol12/iss1/11Mornings are given back to be tasted again, to be moved amongst to be all those other mornings stretching ahead rolling endlessly back to that time before mornings began to Not-morning, that shadow that constantly threatens, still living as it does in our own unseeing. But now I am free to rejoice raucous and clamouring cries. I exhort the sky to break through the walls of my house and it does. I urge the grass to deepen the green of its greenest parts and it does. I look into the earth and it spills out its mineral self. I walk amongst my own body and it is filled with light. 53 Published by USF Scholarship: a digital repository @ Gleeson Library | Geschke Center, 2014

This Is How It Happens

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This Is How It Happens

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