Life in Two Parts
poems by
Hari Bhajan KhalsaISBN: 978-1-59948-232-3
~40 pages, $10About the Author / Comments / Samples
Hari Bhajan Khalsa received her B.A. from Vermont College in 2005, after a hiatus from school for thirty years. Her poems have appeared in over 30 publications with her poem, "I Would Tell You" selected for The Best of the Web 2009. She has been a fellow at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences and Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She is married and splits her time between the sprawling city of Los Angeles and the little mountain town of Sisters, Oregon. Her many careers and passions have included (but are not limited to): yoga, mothering, business management, teaching, life coaching, world travel, dressage, mediation, blogging and currently learning the ways of the web with her new site, Yogamint.
Hari Bhajan Khalsa is a marvelously wry and engaging poet, capable of delightful verbal play as well as powerful meditative reckonings in her work. This is one of those rare collections of poetry where the talents and charm of the poet are matched by both her insights and her wisdoms.
-- David St. John
There's a discipline and tensile strength that balances a lush delight in consonance and list, a rash of sound pulled into place by couplets as this spool of memory, spell and intuition whirs into a demarcation, not between present and past, but external and internal. In a voice trustworthy and trusting enough to share both doubt and truth, Life in Two Parts not only masters but revels in a sense of craft, propels a poetry just taut enough to resonate over the skid marks of the receding century. Its lived details, recently so "new" to us, or simply quotidian-familiar, have already turned-into neither nostalgia nor sentiment, but something suddenly haunting, "as if there had been no trembling."
--Sarah Maclay
What I admire about the poems in Hari Bhajan Khalsa's Life in Two Parts is the way the epigrammatic is woven into the lyric voice--in layers--and the plain sophistication that emerges in these somehow unpretentious but subtly stylized poems. There is an honesty here, residing in a series of satisfying fragments and songs, the fracture and the crashing of sounds merging with a comforting voice.
There is a quality of nerve in these poems--one might even call it the still sure hand of spiritual mania--combined with a lightness of touch. I like the juxtaposition of "selves" the way drama is present, radiating out of the voice, and the way the poems choose to make there way, variously, down the page, poems that seem to me to accept the SOUL of just BEING. This is exceptionally accomplished work.
--David Dodd Lee
Life in Two Parts
One so like a pigeon on the line,
composed of tiny bones
and rendable flesh,
route clearly designated
to home in on the inevitable.The other something pale,
seeks the inside of everything,
speaks when all others die down-
in whispers, pictures, suggestions
of what it would be to fly
without beak or arcing wing.
1968
May, dappled horses in the field;
a white cotton spread,
giving the one virginity I have
on creaking bedsprings,
under the four-paned window,twisting to say darling and love
like Warren Beatty might say to Natalie Wood
before there was a man
on the moon,
before there was a Woodstock
nation.
Out in the grass, knobby-kneed foals
squeal after the spill,
the plucking,
and he sleeps
and I stand
with a cigarette and no clothes,not foretelling the future,
swallowed by the way his hair
falls across his forehead,
casually,
as if everything were perfectly in its place,
as if there had been no trembling.
The Drive
There was rarely snow on that stretch of road,
no ice or bad weather of any kind, where I'd climbsteeply those curves, where eighteen wheelers
loaded with logs or cattle or bales of hay would careen
down the other side, sandwiching a car between them
or thunder up from behind on the downgrade full throttle.I dreaded most winding along the Deschutes,
just north of the reservation, past rows of boxy houses,trailers, each with a rusted out pickup out front,
past smokestacks and the sawmill, dark barslining Highway 97, with their Friday night knife fights,
where no white had the guts to enter. I floated over it all,watched the river, two or three hundred feet below, hurtling
through the canyon, froth on the rapids, making its waynorth and west to the Columbia, to the sea; dreamt for years
of my car missing a curve, soaring into space, elegantarc of steel machine headed toward black
water, weightless in the cobalt air.