"Split the lark, and you'll find the Music - Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled"
Emily Dickinson
The poems of Split the Lark record one man's mission to find the mythic in the social, the crucial in the casual, the supernatural in the natural. R. T. Smith's precise images and quietly modulated music cast a wide net, engaging Native American c...
"Split the lark, and you'll find the Music - Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled"
Emily Dickinson
The poems of Split the Lark record one man's mission to find the mythic in the social, the crucial in the casual, the supernatural in the natural. R. T. Smith's precise images and quietly modulated music cast a wide net, engaging Native American customs and history, the forested mysteries of the American South, the habits of birds and one traveler's ruminations on the people, conflicts and stories of Ireland. This gathering of poems scanning two decades displays, as Eamon Grennan said of Smith's collection Trespasser, "a language at once taut and sensuous, speedy but carefully controlled."
Split the Lark
"Split the lark, and you'll find the Music - Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled - "
Emily Dickinson
Rend the song to splinters
the way it tears the air.
Trace it over meadows,
briars, spruce, the bristle
of crouching hares
until the source is clear -
a breast of softest yellow.
Then lure it to a snare,
sheer away the feathers'
delicate speckling,
the finest silk of skin.
Plunder with your fingers
the colours cloaked within
windpipe, jellies, heart
of the fallen meadowlark -
iris, ginger, veridian.
Savage as a raven's beak,
will you find the bliss
that engined into song -
What you thought the art
beyond counterfeit is gone.
Was it refined disguise
or a tithe of grace
made this bird a wonder,
perching amid oak leaves,
flourishing its skein
of honesty and laughter -
In scarlet experiment
your instrument is riven,
your palms a criminal-red
soiling morning grass.
Now, my skeptic, do you
still doubt your bird was true.
