Jane Cooper

 The Green Notebook

“ When I started writing, . . . I was into making monuments . Now, I’m much more interested in conversations —poet Jane Cooper ’45

There are 64 panes in each window of the Harrisville church where we sit listening to a late Haydn quartet. Near the ceiling clouds build up, slowly brightening, then disperse, till the evening sky glistens like the pink inside of a shell over uncropped grass, over a few slant graves. At Sargent Pond the hollows are the color of strong tea. Looking down you can see decomposed weeds and the muscular brown and green stems of some water lilies. Out there on the float three figures hang between water and air, the heat breathes them, they no longer speak. It is a seamless July afternoon. Nameless. Slowly gathering. ... It seems I am on the edge of discovering the green notebook containing all the poems of my life, I mean the ones I never wrote. The meadow turns intensely green. The notebook is under my fingers. I read. My companions read. Now thunder joins in, scurry of leaves.. . . Copyright 1994 by Jane Cooper. Reprinted by permission of the author and Tilbury House, Publishers