Maudelle Driskell
To Go Forth As a Luminous Being
“Luminous beings are we… not this crude matter.”
Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back
The Jedi Nesting Dolls are smooth and fit together
perfectly; hollows filled with hollows
rounds filled with rounds. Impossibly long necks
supraorbital ridges ears like Anaheim chilis
flanges with all the fixins smoothed
represented two dimensionally in shiny enamel.
“The eyes know what the hands do not.”
Round to round head to head tail to tail in a concentric sequence
A gyre of gimballed supra-galactic super-philosopher pocket sized
nesting ninjas. The smallest is largest; a stretched Yoda containing
Obi Wan, Fistor, and Skywalker. They all fit in my pocket and I can look inside.
“Much to learn you still have, my old padawan. This is just the beginning!”
I can look inside and find nothing there simply a set of hollows filled
with the diminished self. Orbits of belly and back that rattle
together when shaken. Hungry and hollow. Within and within and
within so close but so lonely. Lonely as the fingers of the right hand
for the right elbow; lonely as the sun for its own light . Lonely as being.
Being that thing and longing for that same thing.
Maudelle Driskell lives in Littleton, New Hampshire, and is the executive director of The Frost Place. She holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College and is a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, awarded by Poetry magazine and the Modern Language Association. Her first poetry collection, Talismans, was published by Hobblebush Books in 2014. She was a featured poet at Vanderbilt University’s Millennial Gathering of the Writers of the New South. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, CAIRN, New Orleans Review, All Shook Up, The Made Thing, and The Cortland Review, among others. She is a past winner of the Agnes Scott Writer’s Festival, has been a featured author at the Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, and a residency fellow at the Warren Wilson MFA program. Maudelle volunteers with arts organizations and serves on the boards of Friends of Writers and the Poetry Society of New Hampshire.
Malasaña | Hudson, NY| Cargo Collective | Portland, ME | 2021