What We Have in Common

After the great Diaspora of the citizens of the land of barren longing,
none remain but Earth, and Sky, and their Madness.

Earth wrapped pear-shaped in whale-bone corset,
inching closer to hourglass extinction,
rose crèmes and wine for wheat and water.

Sky dimming, diaphanous on down pillows,
refusing form or flight, tempestuous
bird cries breaking free like bourbon over ice.

Madness hovering gently over them like a canopy,
whirling thick, full of forfeited knowingness,
clenched heart barking damning decrees:


Join the moonlight blood-hunt!

Accept the bow of lost consequence!

Devour with pearly teeth lupine love!

Where is your sense of whimsy?

"Dahlias, now. A raw yardful of dahlias -- we are making our way through them toward the street. A morning. After the first night I slept at his house, which, as you know and he does not, is the first night I slept at any man's house. Through the wet grass, walking behind him. All of a sudden he stops and bends aside. Snaps off a single dark red dahlia, my eyes going out of me like a cry. Lover, I thought. Now he keeps going and reaches his car and jumps in, placing the dahlia on the seat beside him, drives off. With a wave. My car is parked farther down the street."

from Plainwater by Anne Carson

The metallic taste of those memories brings me back, bone-cold.

What a mess I’ve made.

Surfacing, time tarnished, he was
slender hipped, still as a moored ship,
saltwater skin on box-spring seabed,
always a lover of loosened knots, trespass,
the after-quiet, silence.

347 leagues is a long way to pray
when you find yourself facedown in the sand,
full of fire, slowly turning to glass,
unable to escape that sliver of God, displaced
beneath whirlpools, those oblique Black Sea eyes.

He could not be wrecked alone on that filthy island.

Inland, longing and bereft,
I am quietly ruined by the beauty
in believing

in nothing

Carthage

I am Carthage, snatched off the map.
Once warmed by the crazed African sun,
my fingers now extend under the seabed of the Mediterranean.
I wait until time becomes a circle and the past is transformed;
until the past has not passed and my walls fall up from the sand,
walls of gold and ivory envied by Ra and his pharaohs.
Dido will walk backwards out of the underworld,
will be reborn on the funeral pyre of her mad desolation.
I will be reformed through looking glass magic,
sandy streets ever strewn with his fresh footprints.
I will thrive on the stolen rouge kisses of Venus.
Rome will never be born.

I've Been Let Down...

"You cannot will intoxication, vertigo, a ravening or wild love"

Lucie Brock-Broido

"It was heaven sent so I spent it

The sky just slipped through my fingers"

That day his name became a prayer

I wish for one

gold rose morning

to illuminate the last of my longing.

In these five years, mourning

the violence of withheld touch,

I have forgotten nothing,

my own shame bound,

silent, to withering

blindness

Clarice Lispector

"I am alone in the world. I don't believe in anyone for they all tell lies, sometimes even when they're making love. I find that people don't really communicate with each other. The truth comes to me only when I am alone."

from The Hour of the Star

Who, now, is exquisite?

Who, now, is exquisite?

Even for such loveliness,
unsettling, I cannot emerge fully
out of troubled mind and languid slumber,
into the succulent ripe flesh of peach-plum sunrise,
the too-sweet liquor of the tangible, tactile world.

For I am one who thrives on bitterness,
empty, always afflicted by raven dispositions,
circus wishes, limber imaginings
and glittering elephantine dreams.

Each night I will myself incorporeal,
mad with longing for hollow bones
bowed by the way the West wind moves,
coy and audacious as a callous young man.

My cells shall transfigure into temperamental salt-sting,
cold constellations never to be burned
by any stray electric, wounding touch,
every new city a reflection of the last,
a continuous menagerie of unbearable lightness.

This is my religion.

Self Portrait with Magical Thinking

Half sick of shadows,

Winter white-night drifting

She understands the depravity

Of wishing to be seized

By a heavy hot current,

An inescapable hopeless longing

"... roads in autumn will continue to be carnal roads

Else I would be keeping still, living on & on"

Lucie Brock-Broido

"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style"

Young Nabokov

"...the ancient idea that trees connect the underworld, the human world and the heavens (root, trunk and twigs), which in many ancient tales allowed mortals to climb from the earthly plane to the realm of the gods."

Chris Lavers, The Natural History of Unicorns

Lisbeth Zwerger

The Rifle

Somewhere

on a bed of moss

the Erl King lies,

autumn hair

unmoving,

the forest floor

mourning

as the sky fills --

once plucked

sparrows and larks

rejoicing in freedom.