Lily, Floating
Monet limned you, Lily, with his brush
between his teeth. He licked you scarlet
and sunshine amid scumbled, old-blood blues.
How could you not gleam, so contrasted?
And how could you not scream, vibrating there
among salted, sea-green wounds? Lily, how long
were you yelling? Your yellows, gilded guilts
inside insular woodwork. Buried in the soundproof box
of the viewer's expectation, how could you not?
Ophelia kissed you, Lily, with her dying breath. Her sadnessÂ
swallowed you whole. In times of drowning or great panic, the lungs
shove into the throat. What did hers taste like, Lily? When you,
who so often floats, anchored but asea, when you inhaled
what so often floats inside a person, anchored and alee,
did it remind you of salt water? Of paint? I know you know
the taste of both, O long, green mouth
whom Narcissus starved to death on, Lily, lived just long enough
to learn that no one subsists solely on an image.
There needs to be meat and seeds to it, it needs to bleed
across your white hands’ canvas. Do you love your white,
scented hands? Do you love yourself, Lily?
Did you ever dream you might?
And does that dream end with you
drowning?
Lily, the legacy of your lilting little appellation
devoured you, chewed into the charcoal
of your skin, gnawed apart your nerves.
The pain was blue and bright, like the sky viewed
from undersea. Fear fingernailed its teeth
into your wrist that night.
But don’t you feel hungry, Lily, effigying from the inside out,
everything ashing on your tongue? Learn to speak like a fire-breather.
Let it out.
The first thing you do tomorrow
should be to burn down your old house.
Leave all the windows wide open.
Along the hips of volcanoes
is the most beautiful growth.
They should have named you
Garden. They should have
named you Tooth, with roots
as long. Bite back, Lily.
You are not made of petals,
pads. You’ll break flesh or
flame. Lily, leave your mouth
wide open. Breathe in smoke and water –
but breathe, Lily.
Breathe.
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Inevitable Poem
When she leaves you,
you’ll think in words again
for the first time in months.
As you loved her,
that tricky fixture, sly alignment
of someone else’s alphabets
felt entirely too arbitrary to describe
something about which you wereÂ
so sure. There could be noÂ
lexical precedent
for that feeling, becauseÂ
it would have to be the only wordÂ
anyone ever spoke.
When she leaves you,
the first words you’ll think
will bear their ink like weapons:
the lances bookending defeat,
the honed teeth of betrayal.
You will aim them at her,
but the target is painted on
your chest. The v in victim
a boomerang. Any victories
will feel Pyrrhic; any closure
drawn will draw spots of blood
like ellipses.
But remember, dear friend,
that you are a polyglot.
Your first language was your father’s,
your first forename given of him.
But by three years old,
he called you his word for
gentle, who sat quiet
as the moon over the sea. And,
in the fourth grade, as theÂ
Americans still blundered
around discussing you,
you renamed yourself
their word for twin,
an only childÂ
bestride two languagesÂ
and two ways of being.
In college, as professors tried
to teach you Spanish,
you tutored girls in French.
One, a poet, awakened in youÂ
a dream of love, which you woke from
every morning. So you did not expect
to so decidedly entrance
when you met her. But
you came to realize that,
when you told her Goodbye,
you meant I love you
every time. So you said to her,
I love you –
She said to you, Goodbye.
You were not speaking
the same language.
You do make love to her, once --Â
just once, and your heartÂ
separates from your body
like a sunrise. When she wakes before you,
she leaves nothing behind. And there are
no words for this feeling,
because if it were a language,
it could have no
living speaker.
So,
today,
put that poet back on speed-dial
and ask her
how she does it – how she falls in love
with so many words,
but lets them go as she must.
And she’ll tell you:
What I love about them
is their motion. I couldn’t love something
that had nothing better to do
than wait for me. And you,
she’ll say, you must keep walking
away. The Earth slopes in strange
and unassuming ways. Keep your ears
open and you eyes shut. You’ll know it
when you hear it. Because love
is your native language;
it is your body’s native touch.
It is the first language you ever heard,
before you knew what it was to speak;
it is the first language you ever spoke,
each syllable on your tongue gentle
as you had been held; and it is
the first language you spoke to me -- you,
practioner of a strange kind of poetry.
Love is what poets mean
every time we write; we are born towards it.
And everything I’ve written,
I’ve borne towards you,
because poets mean
everything we say,
even when we don’t say it.
And everything I mean,
I’ve meant to say to you,
poet-emeritus.
What I mean
is this:
begin the days that follow
like a new speaker of a language:
listen to everything,
and hear nothing,
nothing
but a frantic pulse of meaning
surfacing between the words
like sunken vessels
towed out of the sea.Â
You know, poetsÂ
swallow things whole,
like the ocean swallows shipwrecks --
but, somewhere, between
the driftwood
and oil fires
and bags full of water
that were once bodies,
you'll surface, too.
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The Gods Inside Icarus
“Icarus also flew.” – Jack Gilbert
Remember the story of Icarus.
One must feel impossibly cold
to seek the healing touch of sun,
and unfathomably heavy
to fabricate wings.
There was so much sad and heavy
hope in him that, when he fell,
he did not lose faith, but
began to dream of ocean.
From the shore, had anyone been watching,
he could have resembled a candle
sent arcing through the air,
the hot wax chewing into the wick
of his bare back.
Listen to me:
as Icarus fell, the world inverted
around him.
There became a million suns
inside the earth, and
he had to have found one of them.
There were a million gods
in his own body,
and he became
at least one of them.
He opened like an eye.
There was enough room in Icarus
to be right
and angry and scared
as he fell, in love with
the wind and his
sea-salt scars.
How will you remember
my story?
I am no more than
the negative space
that delineates sky.
There is no room left in me
after the fear of falling.
I am the kind
who makes wings
from whatever’s on hand.
I have had enough broken hearts
to make a million pairs
from the spare parts.
Yet: hope
opens me
like a mouth.
Come in, she bellows.
Don’t leave us here alone.
Hope
unlocks my rusted doors.
Hope dusts and sets the table
for company.
She asks me
if there’s anything I need
from the store.
Yesterday, it was
to forget everything.
Tomorrow, it will be
to always remember.
But today
I am stepping off
this high, sharp cliff
into history.
I fall like a comet,
carving out space to take up.
So there will be room in me
to be wrong, and disappointed,
and really sad sometimes –
and, also, loved, and secure,
and forgivable.
Listen: as I fall,
the world inverts around me.
I close like a mouth.
I swallow a million little gods.
I don’t know how I’ll land.
(I don’t know if it matters how.)
I aimed headfirst
to make sure it took –
but maybe it will be
like a cat. Maybe I’ll stand up
and walk away from this.
The negative space
around standing up,
that’s all falling is.
The negative space
around what we hope for,
that’s all gods are.
There are millions of suns
beneath the sea.
I’m hoping to meet one of them –
or that I find it as I fall.
The huge and unhaunted sky
arcs like a pair of wings
cut
in the shape of
the space around me,
falling.
This is the story
I want to live to tell:
the story of the gods inside Icarus,
and how we both eclipsed them.
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For Zippy
Was there flight, finally, in those last seconds?
-- The hulking red mass upon him
like a mouth, black-toothed, something already rotting.
Something squealed, brakes or
him. The car thundered
to a stop. Something grew limp,
and two mouths closed.
It hasn't stopped raining,
and cars haven't stopped passing along this road,
spurting waves of white
from their tires on each side,
like ghosts crossing and uncrossing the street,
looking both ways
like it matters.
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Kevin Prufer: "In A Beautiful Country"
A good way to fall in love
is to turn off the headlights
and drive very fast down dark roads.
Another way to fall in love
is to say they are only mints
and swallow them with a strong drink.
Then it is autumn in the body
Your hands are cold.
Then it is winter and we are still at war.
The gold-haired girl is singing into your ear
about how we live in a beautiful country.
Snow sifts from the clouds
into your drink. It doesn’t matter about the war.
A good way to fall in love
is to close up the garage and turn the engine on,
then down you’ll fall through lovely mists
as a body might fall early one morning
from a high window into love. Love,
the broken glass. Love, the scissors
and the water basin. A good way to fall
is with a rope to catch you.
A good way is with something to drink
to help you march forward.
The gold-haired girl says, Don’t worry
about the armies, says, We live in a time
full of love. You’re thinking about this too much.
Slow down. Nothing bad will happen.
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