ALSO BY ADA LIMÓN
Lucky Wreck
This Big Fake World
Sharks in the Rivers
Bright Dead Things
© 2018, Text by Ada Limón
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.
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Published 2018 by Milkweed Editions
Printed in Canada
Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker
Cover art by Stacia Brady
Author photo by Lucas Marquardt
18 19 20 21 22 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Limón, Ada, author.
Title: The carrying: poems / Ada Limón.
Description: First edition. | Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017061361 (print) | LCCN 2018002212 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571319944 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571315120 (hardcover: acid-free paper)
Classification: LCC PS3612.I496 (ebook) | LCC PS3612.I496 A6 2018 (print) | DDC 811/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061361
Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. The Carrying was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Friesens Corporation.
For Lucas & Lily Bean
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1.
A Name
Ancestors
How Most of the Dreams Go
The Leash
Almost Forty
Trying
On a Pink Moon
The Raincoat
The Vulture & the Body
American Pharoah
Dandelion Insomnia
Dream of the Raven
The Visitor
Late Summer after a Panic Attack
Bust
Dead Stars
Dream of Destruction
Prey
2.
The Burying Beetle
How We Are Made
The Light the Living See
The Dead Boy
What I Want to Remember
Overpass
The Millionth Dream of Your Return
Bald Eagles in a Field
I’m Sure about Magic
Wonder Woman
The Real Reason
The Year of the Goldfinches
Notes on the Below
Sundown & All the Damage Done
On a Lamppost Long Ago
Of Roots & Roamers
Killing Methods
Full Gallop
Dream of the Men
A New National Anthem
Cargo
The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to Be Bilingual
It’s Harder
3.
Against Belonging
Instructions on Not Giving Up
Would You Rather
Maybe I’ll Be Another Kind of Mother
Carrying
What I Didn’t Know Before
The Last Thing
Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance
Sway
Sacred Objects
Sometimes I Think My Body Leaves a Shape in the Air
Cannibal Woman
Wife
From the Ash inside the Bone
Time Is On Fire
After the Fire
Losing
The Last Drop
After His Ex Died
Sparrow, What Did You Say?
Notes & Acknowledgments
About the Author
She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.
These were the same horses.
JOY HARJO
1
A NAME
When Eve walked among
the animals and named them—
nightingale, red-shouldered hawk,
fiddler crab, fallow deer—
I wonder if she ever wanted
them to speak back, looked into
their wide wonderful eyes and
whispered, Name me, name me.
ANCESTORS
I’ve come here from the rocks, the bone-like chert,
obsidian, lava rock. I’ve come here from the trees—
chestnut, bay laurel, toyon, acacia, redwood, cedar,
one thousand oaks
that bend with moss and old-man’s beard.
I was born on a green couch on Carriger Road between
the vineyards and the horse pasture.
I don’t remember what I first saw, the brick of light
that unhinged me from the beginning. I don’t remember
my brother’s face, my mother, my father.
Later, I remember leaves, through car windows,
through bedroom windows, through the classroom window,
the way they shaded and patterned the ground, all that
power from roots. Imagine you must survive
without running? I’ve come from the lacing patterns of leaves,
I do not know where else I belong.
HOW MOST OF THE DREAMS GO
First, it’s a fawn dog, and then
it’s a baby. I’m helping him
to swim in a thermal pool,
the water is black as coffee,
the cement edges are steep
so to sink would be easy
and final. I ask the dog
(that is also the child),
Is it okay that I want
you to be my best friend?
And the child nods.
(And the dog nods.)
Sometimes, he drowns.
Sometimes, we drown together.
THE LEASH
After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate-metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say: Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
But sometimes I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks breaknecking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps we are always hurtling our bodies toward
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe,
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.
ALMOST FORTY
The birds were being so bizarre today,
we stood static and listened to them insane
in their winter shock of sweet gum and ash.
We swallow what we won’t say: Maybe
it’s a warning. Maybe they’re screaming
for us to take cover. Inside, your father
seems angry, and the soup’s grown cold
on the stove. I’ve never been someone
to wish for too much, but now I say,
I want to live a long time. You look up
from your work and nod. Yes, but
in good health. We turn up the stove
again and eat what we’ve made together,
each bite an ordinary weapon we wield
against the shrinking of mouths.
TRYING
I’d forgotten how much
I like to grow things, I shout
to him as he passes me to paint
the basement. I’m trellising
the tomatoes in what’s called
a Florida weave. Later, we try
to knock me up again. We do it
in the guest room because that’s
the extent of our adventurism
in a week of violence in Florida
and France. Afterward,
the sun still strong though lowering
inevitably to the horizon, I check
on the plants in the back, my
fingers smelling of sex and tomato
vines. Even now, I don’t know much
about happiness. I still worry
and want an endless stream of more,
but some days I can see the point
in growing something, even if
it’s just to say I cared enough.
ON A PINK MOON
I take out my anger
And lay its shadow
On the stone I rolled
Over what broke me.
I plant three seeds
As a spell. One
For what will grow
Like air around us,
One for what will
Nourish and feed,
One for what will
Cling and remind me—
We are the weeds.
THE RAINCOAT
When the doctor suggested surgery
and a brace for all my youngest years,
my parents scrambled to take me
to massage therapy, deep tissue work,
osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine
unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,
and move more in a body unclouded
by pain. My mom would tell me to sing
songs to her the whole forty-five-minute
drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-
five minutes back from physical therapy.
She’d say that even my voice sounded unfettered
by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,
because I thought she liked it. I never
asked her what she gave up to drive me,
or how her day was before this chore. Today,
at her age, I was driving myself home from yet
another spine appointment, singing along
to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,
and I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.
THE VULTURE & THE BODY
On my way to the fertility clinic,
I pass five dead animals.
First a raccoon with all four paws to the sky
like he’s going to catch whatever bullshit load
falls on him next.
Then, a grown coyote, his golden furred body soft against the white
cement lip of the traffic barrier. Trickster no longer,
an eye closed to what’s coming.
Close to the water tower that says “Florence, Y’all,” which means
I’m near Cincinnati, but still in the bluegrass state,
and close to my exit, I see
three dead deer, all staggered but together, and I realize as I speed
past in my death machine that they are a family. I say something
to myself that’s between a prayer and a curse—how dare we live
on this earth.
I want to tell my doctor about how we all hold a duality
in our minds: futures entirely different, footloose or forged.
I want to tell him how lately, it’s enough to be reminded that my
body is not just my body, but that I’m made of old stars and so’s he,
and that last Tuesday,
I sat alone in the car by the post office and just was
for a whole hour, no one knowing how to find me, until
I got out, the sound of the car door shutting like a gun,
and mailed letters, all of them saying, Thank you.
But in the clinic, the sonogram wand showing my follicles, he asks
if I have any questions, and says, Things are getting exciting.
I want to say, But what about all the dead animals?
But he goes quicksilver, and I’m left to pull my panties up like a big girl.
Some days there is a violent sister inside of me, and a red ladder
that wants to go elsewhere.
I drive home on the other side of the road, going south now.
The white coat has said I’m ready, and I watch as a vulture
crosses over me, heading toward
the carcasses I haven’t properly mourned or even forgiven.
What if, instead of carrying
a child, I am supposed to carry grief?
The great black scavenger flies parallel now, each of us speeding,
intently and driven, toward what we’ve been taught to do with death.
AMERICAN PHAROAH
Despite the morning’s gray static of rain,
we drive to Churchill Downs at 6 a.m.,
eyes still swollen shut with sleep. I say,
Remember when I used to think everything
was getting better and better? Now I think
it’s just getting worse and worse. I know it’s not
what I’m supposed to say as we machine our
way through the silent seventy minutes on 64
over potholes still oozing from the winter’s
wreckage. I’m tired. I’ve had vertigo for five
months and on my first day home, he’s shaken
me awake to see this horse not even race, but
work. He gives me his jacket as we face
the deluge from car to the Twin Spire turnstiles,
and once deep in the fern-green grandstands I see
the crowd. A few hundred maybe, black umbrellas,
cameras, and notepads, wet-winged eager early birds
come to see this Kentucky-bred bay colt with his
chewed-off tail train to end the almost forty-year
American Triple Crown drought. A man next to us,
some horse racing bigwig, hisses a list of reasons
why this horse—his speed-heavy pedigree, muscle
and bone recovery, etcetera etcetera could never