but not the dull blade
of the body—what I crave
Whales
I declare to the man
who has climbed with his wife behind me
Where?
he demands There I say and point
but already it’s mist
THERE IS A ROOM IN THE FOUR DIMENSIONS OF THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM
where candlelight warms our winter bed
and moon-white hips trace ellipses
around the sun of your skin.
There is a kitchen embedded
in the fibers of time
where your chest trembles
under my hands as a soup pot rattles
on the stove. In the dark
theatre of space, amateur actors
unravel Shakespeare, and as the lights
go down I lean
into your lips as shadows lean
into walls. An entryway exists
where your index finger traces
the boundary of my jaw as I slide
into sleep, as if to unlatch
its gate and enter. Enter
an entire hall—longer than a light-year—
where our knees touch
under tables
and the clinking of glasses glitters
like newly born stars. The corner booth
of our first shared smile
waits heavy with wine, bold as a planet
charting its arc. The entire house
is ours—it is always ours.
IV
ELEGY IN THE FORM OF PORCELAIN
winter is a prism in reverse / colors
reassembling into white
snow that illumines
the morning / kisses the dark
needles of pine / the season
before his death / it crusted the patio
like porcelain from plates I split
against it
months later in my rage / all the delicate
flowers arranged in jagged blue
and alabaster triangles / a kaleidoscope
of edges / fine powder
lost between them / the drifting debris
of dead stars / what I mean is
I loved the brushstrokes
at the corners of his eyes / little hairline
fissures / I mean
we are more than our breaks / what cannot
be reconstructed from the bang
or the plate before / spinning like a galaxy
across the porch
SONNET IN THE HIGGS FIELD
I force my heft against an unseen fence
every morning just to climb out of bed
Each limb lead-heavy as if fighting tar
a drag that scientists call mass and I
call massive depression A relentless
resistance as when skiing on the lake
the raft flipped and I did not release the
rope but clutched it harder felt my bones moan
against the force of water a translucent
field of green where trout parted like rays
of light against my ribs and snagged the cold
space of silence When at last I let go
I became weightless afraid a buoyant
breathless particle nameless on the waves
ODE TO A FRACTURED CONCH
You could have been home
to a hermit crab
when I spied you in the sand
imagining you whole—
inspiration for a poem
about fractals
I dreamt the night before
of Mandelbrot’s prime numbers
repeated
in a man’s curls
each of which represented a proportion
of the universe
telescoping upon
its verb
a golden chorus played over
and over
You breathe
water in my hand
throat
cracked through
salt and empty rooms
No evidence of the voice
I was taught to listen to as a child
Can you hear it
my sister insisted
pressing the cool
lip to my ear until I was sure
I could
I believed it was that easy
to commune with the dead
wound within us like a spool
of string from which
one could reconstruct
the chorus of our origin
But the silence segmented
in the stairwell
sentence of your body
is somehow
expected
as when walking among the infinite
arms of ferns
later this afternoon
I will find a dead house finch
its breast peeled
back like a husk of corn
ELEGY IN THE FORM OF STEAM
The teakettle quiets before it whistles
and in that breath I recall
the way your hands did simple tasks
with great intention: crushing garlic
with the thick ball of your palm,
stirring soup like it could be injured.
Making the bed, you took your time
smoothing the crease of the top sheet
like soil over newly planted seeds.
The weight of your hand at rest
comforted the silver handle
as you waited for a shrill scream
to cloud the air, a confirmation
of what was real. I grasp
its slender shoulder, lift its body
from the burner. My contents
falter as its cry
falls cold.
METAMORPHOSIS
i. Cocoon
Your mother smoothed the paper
of your face when she believed you were asleep,
wandered into hospital corners to tuck
her tears between glossy magazines.
And now spring licks this side of the earth
and all the rooted, leaf-winged creatures
remember their past lives in the sun.
Green beaks thrust through loam, yawn
for light and dew. You begged me
not to watch your skeleton emerge
from your skin, having witnessed
your father’s metamorphosis
at only seventeen. But see
how the soil writhes:
a menagerie of vibrant plumes, supple stalks
splitting into peonies.
See how the cells of your brain become
clouds of cottonwood seed
adrift in the humid heat.
ii. Luna
More animal than insect. More mouse
than moth.
Abdomen long as a robin. Wings
ragged as tissue paper.
It crawled through the cedar shards
of the flowerbed under the amber porch light.
A few steps, double-back,
and it was gone.
I was twelve and breasts
budded under my shirt.
I lay awake.
Under the blinds
the sky beat with the color of sinew,
the glistening shade of lip
and tongue, the shiny intestines of the starling
our cat left coiled
on the doorstep. The moon slid
higher in the frame. I knew
there were spaces inside us
that ache toward light.
iii. Lacuna
When people ask, How are you?
my mouth fills with flannel.
How are you doing?
they ask, and I touch the fragile arm
of the sugar bowl
or rather, the hollow
inside its porcelain elbow
where your finger nested
in half-formed thought.
The teakettle howls silver
like a wounded fox
and sometimes I let it howl
until the cat hides under the armchair
because that’s when your hand
would relieve it. I wash the rubbered skin
of a bell pepper, cut away the spire
of seeds that scatter
in the sink, hollow its reddened ribs
to a carcass
warm enough to crawl inside.
V
HOW TO EAT A POMEGRANATE
After Sarah Koenig
Don’t think about the consequences.
Let the primal need to know
fill you with salt. You will carry its tight
belly in the pocket of your coat
for three days, embrace the weight
of the question—a ripe confession,
a reticent guest. I know
you’d rather have a simple task—
fruit with a softened peel, puckered cheek
that yields to a dull edge.
But that’s not why you’re here.
If this is sacrifice, don’t dilute
the amplitude of the act.
One muscled blow
will sling your skin with magenta.
When you begin, an absence
will open at the back of your throat
the way an astronaut entering space feels the floor
fall away. Don’t hesitate.
Use your hands
to scrape the seeds like answers
to your tongue. You will lap
jelly from your palms, bend your fingernails
backward with asking. Do not be ashamed
of the bold carpet stain—
red, relentless proof.
ELEGY IN THE FORM OF A BUTTERFLY BUSH
I pared the boughs back every few months
to keep the twigs from scraping shingles
on the southern side of the shed. Hummingbirds
would make their spry appearances, flit
through sprigs of lilac, vanish
when the shade shifted.
The day they removed the second tumor
from his brain, I stumbled into the garden.
There it stood, silver-limbed and hardy
in the noonday glare. I borrowed an axe.
Hacked it down to an ashen foot. Snapped
the long limbs into sticks.
Months after the funeral, now strong enough
to venture out of doors, thin
and swathed in a robe, what a shock
to see it full and flourishing and larger than before—
hummingbirds dashing between branches
like watercolor brushes.
LITHIUM
Fine like talc. The dust of doves. Faith
you can rub between fingers.
I know you want to believe in objectivity
but let me tell you: your perception
of this moment floats like a darkroom photograph
in a wash of chemistry. Clarity
is what you desire. The fine details. The iris
of his eye daring into focus. I can give you clarity.
I was the red in first fires—a restless, reactive alkali.
When Robert Lowell slept on poets’ lawns
and believed he could halt
traffic with his arms, I recognized the deficiency
in his rabid mania, his melancholia. Listen—
happiness hinges on a fulcrum
of salt and light. David Lovelace said, I’ve been accustomed
to mysteries, holy and otherwise. And don’t you want
both water and wine? Divine and human?
Illumination by intermediary
is still illumination. I can be that.
I can be that for you. Lovelace also said,
Some of us take communion or whiskey
or poison. I lay out my wares
and like a scattered flock of rock pigeons
you come tottering to the bread.
SONNET ON A HOOK
Her white-limbed torso flails into your palm
just like the salmon you caught as a boy—
your first fish. The crescent moon of its hip
beat silver on the belly of the boat,
eyes wide and mouth agape. The tightened line
flecked the deck with red, made you sob and beg
to throw it back—to end those brutal oscillations.
Now the perpetual vowel
of her anatomy opens, slaps your palm,
and you are hook and lure and gasping boy
both caught and catching in a woman’s hip
so that she bows and arcs supine, a boat
unmoored, her jaw unhinged. Let go the line
of where her body breaks and yours begins.
ODE TO A ROTTING APPLE
And it occurred to me, standing there in that bleak, cavernous space, that nobody is ever just one thing…. If the multiverse was about choices, and all possible choices were being made, then we might be all those things and everything in between.
—A.W. HILL
Consider yourself a red house
containing five
slender black doors each containing
a different house
in a different country
Choose one
Turn the knob like a period that extends
to comma that softens the milky
page of your ribs
Let your bruise be passage
to your escape / exit / entry
Be trajectory
gnarled little snake-root
cracking the rim of a seed ellipsis
at the end of the book
Hum at a frequency
only the dead can hear
Let gravity hold you / unfold you
into a thousand rooms one for each
variety of your kind
Recite their names remember nothing
decides the fate of a body
that speaks the language of infinite the lexicon
of overcome and this is not their house
their doors
Utter an impossible thing unfurl green
syllables from a new tongue
Be multiplicity
blossoms freed over the field
Be Honeycrisp / Granny Smith /
Braeburn / Gala / Ambrosia
Construct a new stanza
AMARYLLIS
the amaryllis split this morning into scarlet
tongues after I made love to him or rather
to his ghost it’s the same now to my body
sometimes I cry but today something shuddered
loose inside me and my brain recited God
from God light from light true God from true
God and on and on the whole creed
rushed back to me I hadn’t spoken it in years
and only then in communion with strangers
who filled in gaps where my lips
stumbled here it was in its entirety
whole beautiful verses repeating like a song
only weeks ago the amaryllis was a tight fist
on my windowsill absorbing the thin
light of winter the ice is so thick
it will never release us God from God
light from light one plus one plus one
does not equal three but one again after it wilts
when I cut away the head another
will rise in its place and another after that
and another after that
ALCHEMY
since our bodies last kissed I cry
crossing the ocean between my thighs
it used to be enough
to be a single woman sailing
through her own body steady
and determined
but now I am rudderless
and longing buoys me toward
the ridged fire of the horizon
into which gulls wheel
and disappear—the crucible
where sailboats melt to gold arc wide
into the hip of evening
what is it we carve
into each other when the waves
swallow us when we surface
like survivors unclear
whether we’ve woken in paradise
or death the story
necessitates we continue
that the salt-burned body
keeps breathing
ODE TO THE RETURNED
Give me the wolves that returned to the sea
eons ago when ocean was old hat and every
mammal was walking. Give me the sledge
of their legs into surf, the sheet of salt
drawn across matted fur—a lullaby
forgotten. The slow erase of an amber iris
for a star of obsidian, the algorithm
of wind for the gloss of current.
Claw for fin. Fur for skin. Give me their cold
freedom, the period
of sun dimming, then blotted
by depth. Give me the wide comb
of their bellies, throats like sieves,
the ocean passing through them—growl
turned to howl, turned to song.
ODE TO THE SUN
cracking the boughs
of my neighbors’ pines
with your light—
your first appearance
in what feels like months
let me stand in my bathrobe
one foot in the pantry
the other in the kitchen and lean
to the left
so your fire
finds my irises
I want to be
blinded so when I close
my eyes even then
you are with me—
thumbprint
on the darkness—
NOTES
The poems in this collection first appeared in the following publications:
CALYX: “Elegy in the Form of Steam” (as “Tea Kettle”)
Copper Nickel: “Amaryllis”
Crab Creek Review: “Ode to Dark Matter,” “Lithium”
Isthmus: “Newton’s Apple”
Laurel Review: “Electron Cloud,” “Orionid Meteor,” “Elegy in the Form of Porcelain”
Pacific Northwest Inlander: “Elegy in the Form of a Pomegranate” (as “Ode to a Pomegranate”)
Permafrost: “Metamorphosis”
Poetry Northwest: “Elegy in the Form of an Octopus” (as “Ode to Chromatophores, Ode to an Octopus”)