I put up the white sails.
But is it true?
Aren’t I lying, when for once I should really tell the truth?
You can’t bargain falsely with the gods: the whole force of the bargain is your sincerity.
Oh no, the black sail.
21.
There was a line over which you could cross,
a line close to death,
a line that took you out of the glimmering world
so you flickered with the stench of death:
I had crossed from I into this and back to “I,”
and having crossed, went amiss—
the black sail always flickering
at the corner of my sight.
22.
I wish I could convey to you the urgency of this problem,
now that I am a letter that holds together again.
It is the thing I most want to do, and the thing I most cannot do.
The bus braking on the corner. A red traffic light. Coffee on an empty stomach.
All these things so present.
Nothing was present: there was cotton wool between me and the world.
I felt no desire, nothing, really, except fatigue.
I had a glimmer of what it used to be like—but I also had adapted to circumstance.
I examine each line on my face.
This attempt is a necessary failure. You cannot use the brain to explain what happens when the mind’s integrity fails, leaving biology in its place.
Fragile, sick, frail.
My mind no longer useful, therefore not virtuous.
Navesink
Before he died, blind and emaciated,
my grandfather, who loved the opera,
told me sometimes
among the tall trees he walked and
listened to the sound
of a river entering the sea
by letting itself be swallowed.
The Body in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
When neurons fire they make you feel something is happening, but it’s nothing other than tissue creating an illusion of experience.
—TED HONDERICH, “WHAT IT IS TO BE CONSCIOUS”
Returning from the procedure
I sit in traffic sweating
made of tissue and cells but
I am thinking of the operating room
doctor putting you within, and the green
around me deepens into three shades of green,
a green joy
It didn’t have to be
it could have felt like nothing
made
of nothing
2.
Before the procedure,
I took a selfie in the
waiting room
alone for the last hour
(I hoped)
before my cells and its
articulately fused
an ugly room
sailboat painting,
curling magazines
On my screen I looked
so saturated,
fingers on the phone
where I keep all the shots
of myself to know
I am here (am I here)
The nurse was young, with a nose ring,
she said my name intimately
I startled at
her mouth.
3.
Days of Gonal-F and Lupron,
ten 28 gauge
needles in the belly
pre-mixed agonist
ringing the navel
progesterone, 1.5 inches
(the medicine in your fat
dissolving stings
more than the needle)
a half liter (by IV) of
immunoglobulins
from thirty strangers
(pain from the Latin poena or
penalty, and the Old French peine
or suffering, as punishment),
thirty people’s defenses
against bacteria and viruses
spreading lake-cold up
the bicep’s vein,
a glaze
of borrowed immunity—
(follow me little cell,
I’ll make a home for thee)
So hush my body,
stop attacking
all my little would-bes, stop
mistaking themfor harm
4.
Green things are furling and steepling,
they are in their spring,
the doctor
pathologizing the soil in shadow
the slippery cavernous potential, the luteal sun,
corpses of leaves
helixing—
a violent opening
at the movie theater unbuttoning
my jeans fat with drugs
and popcorn—
5.
Four days later a prick a cramp
the zygote attaches
two drops of blood bloom
andthey bloom
6.
We laid hand inwe lay in hand
I made room some roomwe laid down the coil
and glass they laid the cells inthey
laid plans they in that roomI laid my
body on the steelgurney I laid
me down to sleepI laid anesthetic
the languagewaylaid welaid on the quiet
we laid our credit card on thehush
littlenow I lay youdown we laid the green
cardon the receptionist’s desklaid
the green downsticky on the cab’s seat
we laidwe in the day we in the sun we
Mortals
In my mind I made you failproof: I pictured
the crib, the delicate hair, even the babysweet breath—
I counted what I knew of the body, and copied it out
diligently.
As they grunted and levered you
from the space I’d made
under my ribs
I saw I was the room
you had to leave to be yourself.
Emptily reaching out to hold you—
Poem for My Son
You were of the earth, like a lentil.
The taste of quince, a revulsion at meat.
The others were like a dream that scores
the body long after waking—
But you were sour spit, a pinched pain in the right hip.
oh you made the smells of the city repellent.
On the doctor’s screen,
a black dot with a line through it, a blot,
you grew slowly gray and white,
then boned and legged and oblong and minded.
I made you out of grapefruit and Rice Chex.
—The others were made of longing.—
Each time I saw you in the sound waves
was preparatory, not romantic; not like the wind
but more like a river pushing against my legs,
insisting on its presence. In thick socks
I ate potato chips and congee, built
you without trying, splaying my rib cage.
Lugging my freight down the street,
I thought about what I wanted for you—
(love love and more love)
but you were already you, not
an outgrowth of my mind,
your own strange, remote, hardening body,
moving toward arrival under surgical lights
in sudden, open parenthesis—
The Window at Arles
Even the moon set him going, with its blank stare;
even the walls of the café, which seemed to tilt
and sway as he watched them, green with absinthe.
“It is a wonderful thing to draw a human being.”
All night, van Gogh painted, and then scraped paint from his easel;
the stiff sound of palette knife on canvas,
scratching, made him think of a hungry animal.
Women came and posed.
“It is a wonderful thing to paint a human being, something
that lives,” he told Theo. “It is confoundedly difficult,
but after all it is splendid.”
When the money for models ran out,
he bought plaster casts of hands and hung them
from the room’s crossbeams,
and woke to the sound of their knocking in the wind.
•
One night van Gogh sat in a chair, staring.
Brush in one hand, milk saucer in the other.
The tea was weak. Nothing came. In the morning,
one of his models brought bread and cheese
and made him eat. That afternoon,
he broke the plaster casts, banging hand against hand,
until in a storm of dust he stood coughing.
•
When he worked he felt a scratch at his calf,
a scarlet wound, a whoop of blood. He was hungry;
even his eyes were hungry.
All he saw was red: red snow, red legs of women
in the village rues, red pinwheels of hay.
“It is a wonderful thing
to hurt a human being, something
that lives. It is confoundedly difficult, but after all it is splendid.”
Beyond the shadow, a cave opened
in the trees and led to emptiness,
a yellow you couldn’t quite see an end to.
Van Gogh walked into it,
and his body began to shake. It was a color riot.
He could hear, somewhere, a dog
in the dark thumping its tail.
“How splendid yellow is!” he said.
•
Color is electricity, it turns you blind
if you get hold of it.
It turns you blind if something cold
gets hold of you and blisters.
Walls falling toward you.
When you turn color into a weapon,
something gets left
over: a charred body.
and turn it to praise
as light turns the evening grass
to fear gone blind in the hunt.
How to Be
Like someone on a walk by the sea
thinking of bees and lavender,
like someone who stumbles and for a moment forgets the word “bees,”
looks up to find that the steel-blue sea has disappeared,
that his eyes blur with the snow static of an old TV —
(my life is a series of moments of persuading myself I’m free)
like a person whose language has
slipped away,
you stand on a promontory
with the snow general around you,
one foot in this world and one foot in the possible,
the ground we never think of as a surface,
the water into which we so easily fall,
and what if we do—?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to the editors of the following anthologies, journals, and websites, in which versions of these poems originally appeared:
Academy of American Poets:“Mistaken Self-Portrait as Demeter in Paris” (as “Demeter in Paris”), “Ever”
Best of Best American Poetry (edited by Robert Pinsky): “The Window at Arles”
Best American Poetry 2008 (edited by Charles Wright): “The Window at Arles”
The Grey: “Mistaken Self-Portrait as Persephone in the Desert” (as “Persephone in the Desert”)
Gulf Coast: “The Window at Arles”
The Kenyon Review: “Dread,” “Self-Portrait as Myself,” “Mistaken Self-Portrait as Mother of an Unmade Daughter,” “Unnatural Essay”
The New Yorker: “Unforced Error”; “Poem of Regret for an Old Friend,” “Navesink”
Poetry: “Sun In Days,” “The Night Where You No Longer Live”
Ploughshares: “A Note on Process”
Plume: “Mnemonic”; “Addict Galerie”
Tin House: “Expecting” (as “Nightdream”)
Virginia Quarterly Review: “At Père Lachaise”
I’m grateful to Cathy Park Hong, Monica Youn, Deborah Landau, David Baker, Eleanor Chai, Charles Simic, Paul Muldoon, Christian Wiman, and Katie Kitamura for their comments on early versions of these poems. Special thanks to the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University for providing the time and mental space in which to write some of these poems. My deep thanks to my editor, Jill Bialosky, for her insights and comments, and to my agent, Chris Calhoun, for his support. And thanks to Jim, my first and best reader.
NOTES
“Addict Galerie”: The title is taken from the name of a gallery in Paris.
“A Note on Process”: The italicized quotations are drawn from Nadia Comaneci’s Letters to a Young Gymnast and John Keats’s letters.
“Some Aspects of Red and Black in Particular”: The title of this poem is adapted from Donald Judd’s essay “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular”; the epigraph is taken from this essay, too.
“Mistaken Self-Portrait as Meriwether Lewis”: The section concerning “Frazier’s horse” is adapted from Lewis’s journal.
“The Window at Arles”: “It is a wonderful thing to paint a human being, something that lives. It is confoundedly difficult, but after all it is splendid.” These lines are taken from Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo. Elsewhere in the poem, I modify the line for my own purposes.
“How to Be” owes a debt to Alice Oswald.
ALSO BY MEGHAN O’ROURKE
Once: Poems
Halflife: Poems
The Long Goodbye: A Memoir
Copyright © 2017 by Meghan O’Rourke
All rights reserved
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Names: O’Rourke, Meghan, author.
Title: Sun in days : poems / Meghan O’Rourke.
Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2017]
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