Nan Hunt has taught for over thirty years: poetry, writing workshops, and college English. She innovated Jungian-based writing workshops for UCLA Extension Writing Program: "Trusting the Spontaneous Voice" and "Tygers & Medusas, Writing the Transformation of Anger".  Due to the success of these classes she was invited to lecture and/or teach one-day to two week workshops in more than thirty five U.S. and European  cities. She was presenter and panelist for Associated Writing Programs in Albany and Portland   Her poetry has  appeared in over one hundred publications, including Poets On, Slant, Beloit, Poetry Journal, Southern California Anthology, New Millennium Writing, Kyoto Review, Poet India, (M)other Tongues, The Oregonian, Shelia-Na-Gig, & as finalist in Nimrod and Comstock Review. She has received poetry fellowships from Harcourt Brace, Centrum, Suffield College, and Hambidge Center for the Arts.  The Wrong Bride is her recent collection of poems.

KNOWING

That day something in motion
passed by the corner of my eye.
Was it a bat, that shadow
like spread and joined membranes?
There had been clarity, then a wrinkle
of dark, then another reminder
blotched the sky just out of
being spied, as though
I was not being attentive:
so, I should be teased this way
with suggestions of bat span
wing glide, cloud race, as air
shifted slightly to let a fact
pass through, but so quick and
obliquely near that I would not
be able to give reality shape or name.
I walked on. The wind announced
from the north - old and ruthless;
then it was there before me
and behind, on every side -
not suggestion nor elusiveness
but an avalanche of knowing -
the season brilliant-- but falling, dying.

ROSE IN THE FIRE

Eyes blurred from sleep's other seeing
    I wander into the kitchen
    where morning sun has lit
    every object on the table.

Sunlight refracts from
    the cobalt tumbler into
    sapphires and amethysts --
    exposes ripples in the table's
    wood grain as though honey
    from its translucent jar
    has spilled and been absorbed.

I become a window
    that does not close
    for a long time, as if cleared
    from his foggy low lands
    Vermeer's eyes are mine.

One yellow rose there is seized
    by light, every open petal a tongue
    of flame - the rest scrolled tight
    in its center waiting to open

    to speak to the soul
    being tempered in the fire
    of everyday life.

BREATHE, MEMORY

That lost night waits
to bloom again beyond
sunset's seven veils.
I water the garden
as day exhales
the scent of jasmine
flung like opals into
the air. Night-blooming
bud of heavy desire.
I remember the Inn
at Riverside, a carved
wooden threshold, Spanish
tiles and dark bushes
star-strewn. I remember
a garden where I wait
holding tiny white-fingered
flowers, petals arrayed
like a whirligig.
He walks toward me.
I do not remember
his name; I remember
the flower of his mouth
his youth.
Breath of jasmine teases
my breasts, strokes
my belly. His weight
indenting my body
I do not remember.
He is walking toward
me and his eyes are
ripening in moonlight.

Nan Hunt Moonday poetry reading


© 2008 Nan Hunt


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