Marsha de la O
Marsha de la O, Poems
Marsha de la O is the author of three books. Her most recent book, Every Ravening Thing, came out from Pitt Poetry Series in 2019, published through the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her previous book, Antidote for Night, won the 2015 Isabella Gardner Award and was published by BOA Editions. Her first book, Black Hope, was awarded the New Issues Press Poetry Prize and was published by New Issues Press, Western Michigan University. Black Hope won an Editors’ Choice, Small Press Book Award. Other awards include the Morton Marcus Poetry Award and the da Poetry Award, as well as the Ventura Poetry Festival Poetry Award. De La O has received 3 Individual Artist Grants from the City of Ventura, Cultural Affairs Division, and a Tumbleweeds Residency from the California Arts Council. She has featured multiple times at the LA Times Book Fair at USC, presented at AWP, and given workshops and readings at various colleges and universities including UCLA, UCSB, UC Riverside, the University of Pittsburgh, Sacramento Poetry Center, College of the Redwoods, Cal Lutheran, and other venues. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College and has published extensively in journals and anthologies, including two recent poems in The New Yorker, as well as poems in the Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Barrow Street, Third Coast and the North American Review.
De La O worked as a bilingual teacher in Los Angeles and the rural community of Santa Paula for more than twenty-five years. She studied Spanish in Morelia, Mexico, Costa Rica, and lived for two years in Spain where she worked in a dual-immersion school. She now lives in Ventura, California, with her husband, poetry host and Ventura County Poet Laureate Emeritus, Phil Taggart. Together, they produce poetry readings and events in Ventura County and edit the literary journal Spillway.
Both sides of her family arrived in the Los Angeles area before William Mulholland built the aqueduct that brought in water from the eastern Sierras. Her poetry is associated with the landscapes and cityscapes of Southern California, and is known for its nuanced observation and description of the region. Just don’t expect sun, sand, and celebrity glam; or any other iconic literalism. There is no one-to-one connection between poetry and autobiography or poetry and region. As Machado said, “If you want to write a poem, first you must invent a poet.” Or the possibility of one. Memory, dreams, obsession, imagination, the earth underfoot, the mountains that slice the basin, all of this influences her work. Her poems seethe with an almost molecular agitation, the way sparks fly from flint or synapses light up. Regarding this quality of intensity, de la O says, “If you’ve run for your life and talked for your life and fought for your life, you can also write for your life, later, in tranquility, if tranquility is also relentless.”
Velocities
Oh, woman with the salt wind in your mouth,
with a phalanx of gulls on their way to their fortress
in the clouds, you are a far away cirque
of purest agate at ten thousand feet – where
turquoise taught you to brood into aqua.
When you take small sips of air –
among pear trees, among orange blossoms
and tight apples – light knows your name, Ellen,
it lays down at your verge like a lion.
You’ve become finally the reverse kiss
of spring, with its velocities and dark
horsemen galloping behind your breastbone.
When you walk the wet sand, fish
celebrate nuptials in the nearest wave
in your name. Because you understand
how all bright silver things must
pull back into themselves.
Beyond all the chatter, and even
the tears, you are the scar
the plum sews onto its own skin
when sugar splits it open.
You’re brimming over.
The Boy Who Went Looking
I was espiritu santo, piñon fire–those flames.
I ran the raggedy edge of downslope winds,
turned into a marsh hawk over Cuyama.
I was a little girl under Zaca Lake. I was
opaque. Given petals floating on the surface,
I swallowed. I was quartzite, abalone shell.
Every day I searched for my mother.
I was hidden in a white man’s pocket.
At the river, I became a pole bridge,
a rope, I was hand-over-hand. Once
I saw a ball of light moving slowly down
the track. I ran, but could not reach her.
Now, I wait. I wait. When people ask,
I don’t answer. Silence is also speech.
What Metal Remembers
Yes, I buried a mason jar in that flowerbed
next to our rented cottage, a lock of your hair inside
and a silver ring you rarely wore. What would I give
to climb those stone steps once more, enter the tangle
of violet and cosmos, onyx lips parted, stalks sturdy
enough in this drought for only a single bloom, one
star face with its burning center. What would I give
to kneel and scrabble at our earth with naked fingers?
I could offer all the drowned bells I possess, my cloak
of feathers, my chain-mail, these mother-of-pearl combs
for a chance to touch your black hair again, that lock
darker and younger than we ever were. I would do it.
I want to slip our broken promise onto my hand, how-
ever tarnished, insistent, accustomed to your thicker flesh.
Even after years in darkness among roots weaving and
unweaving their truths, I’m sure metal still remembers you.
And yes, it is true, seeds will scatter from the lowliest
of blooms and one substance imparts its essence to another,
so too I see how willingly I take up residence in the night
singing a song of night. Just like that I buried the mason jar.