» Poetry
Two Poems
Elegy for Recording the Light
with “Victor Jacquemont Holding a Parasol, 1865” & a line from bell hooks
Do you ever get sad thinking that all the dogs
in old paintings are dead? More helpless
than the past is the bruise that carves
it into canvas & the root of martyr,
I learned, is witness. So I practice saying no
to dusk’s orange heel, poised above
my throat. As if existence has a bloodthirst
for testimony. As if stillness is a eulogy
I’m working up the bravery for.
Contemplating death leads us
back to love. It’s not that the dark
is thicker, but that in the meteoric
hours under a soup’s-ladle
of Orionids, I’m embedded with need
to pass sunflower atoms from my tongue
to your tongue. There are so many people
I will never see old: Most. My father
hiding in the blackberry field
lacing the sun to his ghost boots. After
you tell me about the island mangroves,
I gift you a jar of blackberry jam
from my grandmother’s land & remember
Monet’s admission that while
watching someone he loved
die, he spent up the time analyzing
the pigments in her eyelids, deciding
how to paint them. We can only learn
so much from squatting in the dirt
with capillaries hung like dried roses
to preserve in the shroud
of pages. I’ll spend a life failing
to befriend the fear that all of this glows
& ends: a faint slash of tenderness
before the sorrow festival.
Tallahassee Spring
I
Passing a rare live deer at the side
of the highway, far enough
in the grass to pretend it doesn’t know
the twisted necks & blank eyes
its kind are prone to, a lineage of split livers
ant-eaten like cupcakes
My mother says possums kill
by tunneling up through a creature’s ass
It’s true. Kick a dead calf, a possum
peeks sheepishly out the bloated mouth
Hold my hand ten more miles & I’ll stop
myself from telling you, again, about the dead
bird in my Kentucky yard & the other
who landed to stare. Unflinching
Even the rabbits are hiding
long-eared ghosts—someone they swallowed
for safekeeping. What if we chose to forget
the impulsive deployment of knives, if we believed
honeybees were the only blameless beings
II
Birds & more birds
plow the bluegray morning
The shivery opulence with which we split
into a nest of hotbreathed animals
Splayed like iguanas in the daylight
Sometimes you are touching me
& I am thinking up ways to get ovened into dirt
Witnesses, too, are actors
in the grieving process. Driving
into Florida’s oblong belly, I memorized
new spells for desire: tying hair strands
around a bay leaf, then burying it
with both hands in red mud. If you have someone
who will bury with you, what we call tenderness
is simply the condition
Again I lay at your back, wearing
the face of the wolves that ate me
III
Who will tell the bees
the names of all the dead?
My friend’s mother says
she packed the hive in wool
but within days
she found them frozen
in breathless Arkansas winter
Huddled in a ball of ice
IV
When a leaf sprouts does it name itself
Preparation For The Rotting
If you love someone why not make them happy
without you
V
There is nothing so alive as crying
under purgatorial dawn filtered
through the clanking brogue of a train tunneling backwards
Watching briary porches on the brick tenements
slide away from us like futures
The whole sweet metal sow, inside its glass stomachs
I grow fat with wonder
How potato chip bags & dogs & daylight are all
made of dark space matter & us too, yes, your finger
hooked through my finger like the tiniest window latch, my heart
clinking between your teeth,
the smallest unlatched window
VI
I feel dying. Small children say this
Hothouse as fuck this Tallahassee spring
Slivers of broken lightbulb glittering the bedsheets
There was a woman sleeping in the road
that wraps around the cemetery
A stranger
Green green bottomland
wilding my sorrow
with unrelenting blooms
Let us look on one another
with the joyful urgency of cakebearers