APRIL: AIR, Lee Ann Roripaugh
Poetry Reading with LeeAnn Roripaugh & Linda Martin
Thursday, April 16, 6pm
Teen/Adult Writing Workshops
Wednesdays, April 22 & 29
6pm potluck / 7pm-9pm workshop
A Wyoming native and second-generation Japanese American, Lee Ann Roripaugh studied music, earning a BM in piano performance and an MM in music history before earning an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Beyond Heart Mountain (1999), which was selected by Ishmael Reed for the National Poetry Series;Year of the Snake (2004); and On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year (2009).
In Beyond Heart Mountain Roripaugh drew on her heritage and life in the American West to create a series of portraits in the voices of Japanese American internees at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. In Year of the Snake she explores issues of mixed-race identity, myths, Japanese fairy tales, and metaphors of transformation. Poems in On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year delve into the lives of contemporary women, with a nod to Lady Murasaki; poet Maura Stanton identified “desire, along with its many disguises and tricks” as a theme of the collection.
Roripaugh’s awards include a Bush Artist Foundation Individual Fellowship and the 1995 Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize.
DREAM CARP
BY LEE ANN RORIPAUGH
People traveled from miles away to see
my paintings of fish—
the jeweled armor of their scales, the beadlike
set of their eyes in
rubbery socket rings, the glimmering
swish of fin and tail
so real it seemed that you could almost dip
a net deep into
the paper and pull up the arching wet
weight of a golden carp,
a shiny trout, or the dark muscular
heft of a bass with
its mouth stretched into the surprised, wiry
“oh” of a child’s wind
sock. I captured my models from the sea,
lake, and goldfish pond
in the back garden, so careful not to
let their mouths be torn
by the hook, their scales chipped, or the silky
tissue of their tails
ripped by a clumsy hand. I kept them in
large glass bowls, fed them
mosquito wings or dry silkworm pupas
offered from chopsticks,
and when I was finished making sketches,
I quickly took them
back and set them free again. Every
night I dream I swim
with these fish as a golden carp—black spots
on cloisonné scales,
pulled to the surface by the deceptive
creamy luster of
the moon or the sizzle of firefly lights
across the water.
And every night I am tempted once
again by the smell
of the baited hook, by my predictable
hunger for earthly
things, and each time I am surprised again
by the stinging hook
in my lip that pulls me mercilessly
into the bright air,
setting my gills on fire, the sharp, silver
pain of the knife that
slits me open so easily from tail
to throat to reveal
the scarlet elastic of my raw gills,
the translucent film
of my air sac, the milky rise of my
stomach, and the gray
marbled coil of my intestines. I rise
late each day, and work
in brighter light. When I die, I will
have my paintings brought
down to the lake and slipped into the water.
First the edges of
ink will blur, and then there will be a great
flurry as the fins,
tails, and bodies begin blossoming in-
to life again, each
fish detaching from its canvas of silk
or rice paper—a
swirl of color, motion, swimming away.
Lee Ann Roripaugh, “Dream Carp” from Year of the Snake. Copyright © 2004 by Lee Ann Roripaugh. Reprinted by permission of Southern Illinois University Press.
Source: Year of the Snake (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004)