Themselves to sleep in leaves from maple trees.
No bad dreams will come to them I know
Because once, in the gone-ago, I was a lynx as well, safe as a tiger-iris
In its silt on the banks of the Euphrates, as you were. Would they take
You now from me, like Leonardo’s sleeve disappearing in
The air. And when I woke I could not wake
You, little sphinx, I could not keep you here with me.
Anywhere, I could not bear to let you go. Stay here
In our clouded bed of wind and timothy with me.
Lie here with me in snow.
A CAGE GOES IN SEARCH OF A BIRD
I.
The animals are ironed, docile now, flat at my feet.
II.
I was uncertain of certain mythologies,
Invisible as the milk waiting to happen
To the newborn litter of opossums.
III.
In a brief violet hour, this time
Of year, the one-winged lapwing tries to fly but stands
Still on the stain of the small accumulation of what was.
Be good, they said, and so too I was
Good until I was not.
IV.
It was a time when all the heavens’ spare, used vessels coffin-Cornered down a narrow well of hills, would pour out
To the open sea like a swarm of mourning cloaks, unmuffling.
V.
At the inn, the servants fawn on me. The coachman, vexed,
Treats me as a hummingbird outside its whittled cage.
VI.
An hour in the afternoon of a lark.
VII.
There I slept in the gold folds of the executioner’s robe,
All that fabric spilling
Out before him like unbundled honey from its jars.
I am alive
Now. It is the first night of the year. The air is salt
Even this far inland. I wish on a planet, thinking it’s a star.
On stars you can wish.
VIII.
There is little left of this, already
Some ilk of lemminglikes
Disassemble on the hill.
IX.
It is not volitional.
NOTES
FREEDOM OF SPEECH is for Liam Rector.
The title YOU HAVE HARNESSED YOURSELF RIDICULOUSLY TO THIS WORLD was suggested by a one-line entry (no. 44) in Franz Kafka’s “Reflections” collected in his Blue Octavo Notebooks.
The poem MEDITATION ON THE SOURCES OF THE CATASTROPHIC IMAGINATION was, in part, suggested by W. G. Sebald’s book-length poem, After Nature.
Some phrases in OF RICKEY RAY RECTOR are taken from Marshall Frady’s “Death in Arkansas” (The New Yorker, 22 February 1993). “Staff Personnel Reports” in the poem are quoted from the journals guards kept on death row.
MOON RIVER is for Franz Wright.
Italicized lines in THREE MEMORIES OF HEAVEN are from Rafael Alberti’s poem “Three Remembrances of Heaven.”
HELLO BABIES, WELCOME TO EARTH is a line from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1965 novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
BIRD, SINGING is for Jason Shinder.
The phrase ON HAVING CONTRACTED THE HABIT OF BELIEVING IN THE INTERIOR WORLD was suggested by Julio Cortázar’s poem “Instructions on How to Cry.”
CONSIDERING THE POSSIBLE MUSIC OF YOUR HAIR is a phrase adapted from Rafael Alberti’s “Three Remembrances of Heaven.”
WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE is the title of Shirley Jackson’s final novel, published in 1962.
The title A CAGE GOES IN SEARCH OF A BIRD is adapted from a one-line entry (no. 16) in Franz Kafka’s “Reflections” collected in his Blue Octavo Notebooks.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Selected poems in this work were originally published in the following:
The Academy of American Poets
“Dove, Interrupted”
“A Meadow”
The American Poetry Review
“A Cage Goes in Search of a Bird”
“Considering the Possible Music of Your Hair”
“Dear Shadows,”
“Death, XXL”
“Dove, Abiding”
“Fame Rabies”
“A Girl’s Will”
“Non-Fiction Poem”
“Of Rickey Ray Rector”
“Selected Poem”
The Boston Review
“Bird, Singing”
The Cortland Review
“Miss Ruby Garnett’s Ornament, Circa 1892”
Gulf Coast
“Little Industry of Ghosts”
“The Matador”
Lana Turner
“Of Tookie Williams”
The New Yorker
“For a Snow Leopard in October”
“Heat”
“Infinite Riches in the Smallest Room” (published as “Noctuary”)
“Moon River”
The Paris Review
“Posthumous Seduction”
Parnassus: Poetry in Review
“Freedom of Speech”
“Meditation on the Sources of the Catastrophic Imagination”
“Notes from the Trepidarium”
“Observations from the Glasgow Coma Scale”
Poetry Magazine
“Carpe Demon”
“Currying the Fallow-Colored Horse”
“Extreme Wisteria”
“Father, in Drawer”
“Gouldian Kit”
“You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World”
Poetry Salzburg
“A Girl Ago”
“Two Girls Ago”
Something Understood: Essays & Poetry for Helen Vendler
“In Owl Weather”
The New Republic
“Just-So Story”
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lucie Brock-Broido is the author of three previous collections of poetry, A Hunger, The Master Letters, and Trouble in Mind. She is also the author of Soul Keeping Company: Selected Poems (published in the U.K.) and the editor of Letters to a Stranger by Thomas James. She is Director of Poetry in the School of the Arts at Columbia University and lives in New York City and in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Also by Lucie Brock-Broido
A Hunger
The Master Letters
Trouble in Mind
These are Borzoi Books, published in New York by Alfred A. Knopf