Why? Why adore you from this gray distance?
Put your hands on me. Make me writhe in your salt and fire.
Whitsunday
I wrote my own vows:
the ocean azure like a sky
filled with contrasts.
I wrote: This time I want
to be born right.
I wrote: Death to tribulation.
“Your robe suits me
like a ladder without rungs,” I mean
“I'll always love you
like a spider,” I mean—
damn this iridescence
in my mouth!
Why do you
twist my words?
Whitsunday
All I wanted was an island—
salt-white, aquamarine,
the forests crenulated and fern-dense,
the night scorpion-centered.
By the light of the green corn moon
you'd come to me
crossing the ocean on a white skiff,
each of your stinging arms munificent.
All I wanted was this place of glory
and things that can never be
to be. The sky is black, the southern cross
Winter. Spring. Sorrow. Endeavor.
Fuck white. You started this.
woman in love/Agatha, doubting
Just say the word and I'll let myself
be led into the red humiliating light, ask
and I'll root through hot coals,
broken plates, I'll shut the rack's iron cuffs
on my own feet, use my teeth to tie my wrists
to the breaking point. I'd advance the wheel on myself
smashing the long icicle of my back
if I thought You'd be pleased.
Note this: I've come to You
bearing the stumps of my breasts arranged on a platter—
they are like two loaves of bread, they are like dark bells
tolling in Your hands—
what do I have to do?
zeitgeist
or Chapter VIII: The Death of the Poet
after Red Pomegranate
1.
One by one the men remove their black cassocks, let in the dawn.
2.
At the top of the stairs a door opens. Behind it, the darkness tactile, felt-like.
3.
She arrives in a green gilded gown, on her shoulder a white bird
perched like a balance.
4.
If you touched them, the walls would crumble in your hands.
The roof is made of stone. One by one the men unrobe. Even here
they cry like candles.
6.
When someone speaks, it is only to command you to sing.
7.
What does it mean to fall on your knees, to let what spills from the jug
8.
Sing.
9.
pour over you?
10.
“Though I die, no more will be lost to the world.”
11.
12.
Your sentence is an unpaved road. The fruit was bleeding.
The camera never moves.
EPILOGUE
“Who lit this flame in us?”
I can say there are creatures that live on steam, there are flowers
that cast themselves in glass. Even now there is a manta ray
floating like a blank page, its body cartilaginous, a single wing
rippling. There are worlds within worlds within the tunics of the eye
and for each there are seven exits. All night there is
the song of the meniscus, all night the processes drift
here and back.
“I want to stay changeless for you.”
Where is it written that we should want to be saved?
What did the water feel like? Where did constancy go?
In serrations? In flat bands?
What part said, “I don't want to have to.”
What didn't you say? How did the earth respond?
When did you realize? Who let loose the shattering?
“If I don't meet you in this life, let me feel the lack.”
Now there is almost no sound and at night I am not afraid.
The next world will be made of paper and everything
will have the capacity to fly. Promise me it will be there
as it is here—the raspberries climbing the trellis, the rivers
blue scripts. Because every story has two endings, I see your body
breaking down, I see you soaring in the light. Be taken with me.
Come pouring down unified.
“Who are you to live in all these many forms?”
There was another time, the duck's severed head
floating in the lagoon. I remember the canoe's broad balance,
how my dog crawled up on the floating island and I cried
because I didn't want her to sink through. How I came to realize
there are places where the earth goes unattached,
and how some things are light enough to walk there.
How nothing comes back, the wildflowers matted in their fur.
acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Wallace E. Stegner Fellowship Program at Stanford University for its support in the writing of this manuscript. I would also like to thank the University of Wisconsin's Institute for Creative Writing for its generous Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship (as well as its friendship) which has also been crucial in the formation of this work. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the following publications in which these poems first appeared:
The Missouri Review, “child of the enemy,” “intermurals,” “Whitsunday” (“Everything that has ever happened has happened”), “Whitsunday” (“Today on land, a lesser being would robe itself in glass”), “Who lit this flame in us?” and “If I don't meet you in this life, let me feel the lack.”; The New Yorker. “If dy/dx=4x3 + x2 - 12/ 2x 2 - 9, then”; P.N. Review (U.K.): “asylum”
P J Harvey lyrics are from the song “To Bring You My Love” from the album of the same name, released in February 1995 by Island Records. In the poem “Meanwhile, Back in the Relative Safety of a Ticker Tape Parade, Buzz Aldrin has a Moment of Epiphany…” the line “I was born here and I'll die here against my will” is from the Bob Dylan song “Not Dark Yet,” from the album Time Out of Mind, released in 1997 by Sony Music. The titles “Who lit this flame in us?” “I want to stay changeless for you,” “If I don't meet you in this life, let me feel the lack,” and “Who are you to live in all these many forms?” are quotes from the film The Thin Red Line by Phoenix Pictures and Fox 2000 Pictures.