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 sadness  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.

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 were  so sure. There could be no  lexical precedent for that feeling, because  it would have to be the only word  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 the  Americans still blundered around discussing you, you renamed yourself their word for twin, an only child  bestride two languages  and two ways of being. In college, as professors tried to teach you Spanish, you tutored girls in French. One, a poet, awakened in you  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 --  just once, and your heart  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.  You know, poets  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.

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.

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.

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.