Eve at forty’s dissatisfied
with the shape of her hips
& having to correct the record—
the scratching out, the adding in.
If given her youth to live again,
she’d’ve covered up & found
a quiet corner of the garden
away from need & distraction,
away from the constant pummeling
rainbows & seedless grapes.
She’d wanted to be a mother,
but not the mother of all,
the butt of jokes, the fractured rib,
when it was merely a moment
of weakness & slight despair.
You, too, encounter moments
of weakness & slight despair,
when its easier simply to let go
& see what tomorrow brings.
There were no pills to halt
the onslaught, no backup plan.
God, she thinks, it was just a flash,
and then quite suddenly
she was denied ice cream forever
& lightning bugs & strolls in the park.…
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I require angels—
Antonin Artaud
Two angels, weary, find a coffee shop,
order black coffee with their perfect minds.
A baffled server sets white mugs behind
a limp flower. The rising sunlight stops
above the bloom. A laughing man mops
the sidewalk. The angels send him tired joy
and stare at the black surface of their cups
still seeing marked doors they counted, annoyed,
all night. They don’t like knowing who will die
each day. Their long wings—folded, undeployed—
sag. They know that the coffee’s only a symbol
and they are tired of those, too. One gambles
on a scone, dropping coins as a decoy
sin. They both wish they were able to lie.
– Mark Mitchell…
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I.
The Garden
An enchantress sighs
in the room you thought empty, clearing a place for you. She calls out, this
seductive crone, in a language you almost recall. She needs to remind you of
something, but you have no way to respond beyond the ghost-like assent of your
presence. Beyond the barking of the dogs, below the level of speech is a place
that grants access, so you enter. She carries a lifetime of pain and loss. Hers
is an unassailable grief that finds release in the few remaining joys left to
her—calling birds down from the trees and feeding them from the palm of her
hand, bathing throughout the moonlit night in the tropical garden, loving the
humid air that pours the essence of jasmine, lemongrass and nightshade across
the ravaged contours of her flesh, a white cat the sole witness to the forms
she takes in her purposeful flight from pure earth to pure light.…
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A bottle and Styrofoam container against the passionflowers
the silver-streaked scrub hopper, took to the chestnut light:
what we resist, breathlessly we visit in our sleep
like the Fritillary among the bog, drawn from long nectar pints:
when I was born, I stood origin-less like the hunger along the Rio Grande.
Among the stray flight on brush stalk, a selective mutism
reticulated, variegated, an artifact that crossed from Mexico
from Sonoran folkloric sustenance, and in the gulf, chestnut sunlight,
stamped out an unseen pirouette, breathless, like a Cordera
sung to later generations struggling to resist, inherited
on a day-laborer’s rucksack, Regal Fritillaries disappeared from the East
in the late 1970s; now a Calvary belts out in strands along abandoned Forts
near dried-cracked Pastures: the softest part of a rose preexisted
the emerging violets in their fragility last forever:
no one noticed, not even in a eulogy, when the last one dropped. …
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At first, the grief was bare, an unsheathed sword,
its presence sharp. But then it turned, slowly,
into a faded tattoo on a hidden part of my body.
I tried calling your phone last night.
I don’t know what I expected, but I was scared.
When I’m dripping in too much darkness,
that same profound, welling of sadness finds me.
It appears in the strangest places; in the back
of my throat, at the roots of my heart. These moments
are punctuated by the smell of oolong tea, memories
of getting drunk off Blue Wave Vodka at Brian’s house, hiding
from the cops in your car. But you’re gone, you’ll never read this.
When I found out, I ate an edible and laid on my couch for 20 hours,
trying to wrap my mind around it, but it was just you,
swallowing lemon seeds, presenting your empty mouth,
tongue drawn out toward me, the pride you had in that moment,
the laughs that filled our empty stomachs, the crows feet on your
face when you smiled, like footprints in the snow.…
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I finish book drafts,
a dedication, footer-pagination.
I tuck and roll
a few final arrangements
neatly justified. Suburban life
similar in its style
manuals stream-lining formal
editing and copy. Writing
a respite with current
change in the air.
Shrinking margins offer burial
and discounts on ritual
exorcism. I frequently overuse
words – blood, song, “light” –
sometimes cradles the unborn
fragments of memory dimmed …
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Why do I cry?
I saw a jewel.
No heart, no bones
and nerveless in
the pink postcoital light—
I am nowhere near done,
so you say
imagine an animal—
and I am taken
to the white core of
the Cambrian explosion,
bend in the heat and
emerge with an apple—
and we have bobbed in the tropics,
bobbed in the icy polar seas
and mindlessly scoured the floor—
stingers drawn
head and tail aglow with
Jamaica Farewell,
you catch a swell.
– Josh Lipson…
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