SCAPES
Adam Cornford

(Click HERE to read SCAPES) 


from THE GREEN STAR

after Lin Carter

As the green star rises

            we runaways from Steel Planet wake

                                                                                    in branching shadow

                                                                        under

                                                the green star we

descend            below lawn-wide leaves into                   expanded origin

 

Green star, engine of transmutation glowing in every cell, let us take passage on your Green Star Line

 

            As the green star

rises

            lemur tongues inscribe

                                                 death-script around      porticos of bark

a snail-car trailing silk

                                                steam traverses

                                                                                    midforest aisles

 

Green star, attractor of the currents of leaves, the fractals of insects, draw us into your viridian spiral


About SCAPES

These poems explore territories at various levels of the imagination—from the inscription of biography into the poet’s hands, by way of the worlds created by visual artists and fundamental physicists, to the infinite vistas we are able to perceive when we cleanse the doors of our perception. The poems are formally various but share key underlying themes. Central to these are two dawning understandings derived from physics and cosmology: that we are surrounded by infinities of other universes in which everything that can possibly happen does happen; and that mind is integral to the very existence of space and time. Also permeating the work is the vision of William Blake, who understood these realities in his own way two centuries ahead of science.

Adam Francis Cornford 

  Adam Francis Cornford, born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, came to the United States as a student in 1969. Since then he has lived almost entirely in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he has worked as a commercial painter, youth counselor, nonprofit director, teacher, professor, and freelance editor and writer. From 1987 until the closure of that institution in 2008, Cornford led the Poetics Program at New College of California in San Francisco and also taught in its undergraduate Humanities program. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines in print and on the web, and he has published three full-length poetry collections: Shooting Scripts (1978), Animations (1988), and Decision Forest (1997) as well as several chapbooks. Recent or forthcoming publications are on DeepOakland.org, Counterexample Poetics, Newport Review, and now Differentia Press among other places. Cornford has collaborated extensively with the composer Daniel Steven Crafts on lyrics and libretti. He is currently working on a science-fiction novel, a sequence of “translations” of works of visual art, and a monograph on William Blake’s epistemology in relation to modern science. He lives in Oakland, California.