Santa Cruz Poets, Santa Cruz Inspiration: Pascal Petit

The University among the Redwoods, Santa Cruz They’re up there—the students, in their high halls, sleeping among the redwoods, in the university of leaves. The sky is a blue-bound volume of flickering white pages they wake to—a morning mist of evaporating inks. All night, a black bible big as the universe writes star-scriptures. The sequoias are illuminated manuscripts through which to glimpse stories of our sun. Their branches hum as tree-scholars take the morning staircase down. On every floor they pass another library of light, upper stories where birds sing hosannas, the hymn of canopy cascades, sky-pools for the clouded salamander, the great hanging gardens of the treetops. As the students descend, they become heavier, they stumble down the steps, for they have come to the middle region where needles start to hiss as the breezes hush, the zone of knotholes where stars have nested in the night-tree’s swaying mast. To the lower trunk where scrolls are ash in smoldering fire-caves. They crawl past zones of silence, those sawn- through stadium-stumps, and they go to class. Pascale Petit Pascale Petit (an honorary local thanks to this poem) was born in Paris and lives in London. The U.S. edition of her latest collection What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo is published in May 2011 by Black Lawrence Press. The U.K. edition (Seren, 2010) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Wales Book of the Year and was a Book of the Year in the Observer. She has published five collections, three of which were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and which were Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement and the Independent. She trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art, was a visual artist for the first part of her life and currently tutors poetry courses for Tate Modern, The Poetry School and is the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art. www.pascalepetit.co.uk and www.pascalepetit.blogspot.com Santa Cruz Poets, Santa Cruz Inspiration, edited by Robert Sward, appears weekly on this page and monthly in Santa Cruz Weekly. Selections are by invitation.

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