by Jay Rogoff
nocturnal seed, oh nacreous seafarer.
The Fountain
All things flow from her. We know her tears
create the stinging sea, and when she sighs
the ferries founder and the porpoises
and whales can’t focus on their own discourse
for the disturbance. These are the waters
of life, the bitter fluids fleeing her body’s
perfection with such speed that when her piss
drills a road to the earth’s center, all wars
suddenly cease and enemies tumble in.
Her flowings are the means by which we mourn
the dead, the living, and those never born,
for mystery is in her menstruation—
like manna her ministrations trickle
into wine I drink from a crystal bowl.
The Garden
The trials of being human, the terrible
things they do out of passion, behead you, lock
you in a high tower, fire arrows, break
your quick legs on a wheel—all for the rabble!
In the garden the martyrs make their noble
march with the touching outrage of the meek,
waving their palm fronds high in the air. Look!
They want to be trees! That promises fruitful
salvation: not to die, but to feel birdsongs
trembling your privacy green as Daphne’s
changes. Whoever heard such strange branchings?
Dressed in green desire still my darling climbs
skyward, still reads, still sings her arias,
lovebirds and lovers wreathing in her limbs.
The Singer
Or else her voice is such an instrument
as wrings grimaces from a singing angel,
a robin’s wrangle, not a nightingale,
carrying a tune, otherwise untrained,
an instrument of evening, a voice blunt
as wet leaves, the rotting odors of fall
and mourning, yet with such a strong fertile
call as makes rutting spring feel imminent.
Via those obstacles to melody—
her teeth, her tongue, her barely opened lips,
her mystic media conducting my strange
trek inside her voice—her notes, like Möbius strips,
bring forth themselves, each naked flowering tree
shedding fragrance over and over like song.
The Bride
Chasing my darling through the snow-lit trees
to a room in a realm where rain always rained,
I knelt outside, spying love through the blind
and fingering the pane, its cracked glass
splitting my view between dress and undress,
light breaking from skin emerging ungowned,
unblue, unvelveted, my sight unstained
save for that other between her and my eyes.
Imagine my shock, my severest charge
short-circuiting broad waking dreams of marriage
with wet lips full of syllables that spill
like flung neon through rain calling Motel,
a sign, like light cast out of her forehead,
how willingly she could be spirited.
The Mirror
If marriage as a mirror of our world
gives us the ardent pair, blood-red bedclothes
funkily fragrant, garden-lit windows,
wood clogs, a little terrier, what world
does she reflect? What message does the gold
leaf back of her translucent skin disclose?
Speculation spreads like a cellist’s knees;
she’s like no other, mirroring each mere word
she reads, so what she reflects is mystery.
I ache for her to apprehend me, perfected
in her jewels’ white light stupid as a star,
or to swing her eyes suddenly up at me—
I’d enter their reflection, her deep mirror.
That’s the world to live in, all in her head.
The Table
The angel is in love with her. He wants
to break his contract as the messenger.
He wants to speak for himself. But what terror
in choosing the dreck of human romance,
to feel wing-feathers scatter to the winds;
worse, to have to eat, to kneel at her altar,
he who’s never so much as tasted water,
his airy gorge rising at those communions:
the bread not even bread but always tasting
like human flesh, the wine rich, disgusting
as blood. Yet he’d eat at her board, he’d grow
bones for her; if he could encounter her by
chance somewhere, a garden say, even he
might offer her some food, some fruit or something.
The Lover
Love lies, neither emotion nor disease
but a text the flesh hungers to decode,
demanding a translation into blood
and gilt. See how the book of everything lies
upon her lap, as open as her face
whose downcast eyes have passions to confide
to the page, turmoils that, objectified,
would straiten me if locked in her embrace.
Lift your luxurious eyes off that page.
Nothing there can save us from the ravage
of the skin’s quick touch into bones—old themes
crumbling our entwined bodies downward grace-
lessly. What remains!—absorbed by your face
absorbed in your reading of these poems.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the editors of the following publications, in which most of these poems appeared previously, some in different form: Abiko Quarterly: “Adirondack Scenic”; Agni: “Life Sentence”; Arch and Quiver: “The Lover”; Café Review: “Re- demption Center”; Chelsea: “Mother and Child” and “Translations”; Confronta- tion: “Practicing”; Crazyhorse: “Intercourse” and “The Mother”; DoubleTake: “The Reader”; Formalist: section 4 of “Mother and Child” (as “Mother and Child”);Georgia Review: “Dirty Linen”; Hopkins Review: “No Dream”; The Journal: “Court- ship at Isenheim” and “The Singer”; Kenyon Review: “Dazzle,” “Laughter,” “The Light,” “The Mirror,” “The Outer Banks,” and “The Table”; Literary Imagination: “The Fountain” and “The House”; Manōa: “Gingkos” and “A Son for My Ex!”;Many Mountains Moving: “The Field” and “The Soul”; Margie: “For Malcolm in Carolina”; Marlboro Review: “Adirondack Scenic” and “Orienting”; Paris Review: “The Bride,” “The Queen,” and “The Virgin”; Partisan Review: “The Vessel”; Poetry London: “The Earth”; Poetry Northwest: “The Kindergarten Heart”; Poetry Review: “The Daughter” and “The Window”; Prairie Schooner: “Butterfly Effect”; Salma- gundi: “Only Child”; Shenandoah: “The Garden”; Southern Humanities Review: “The Doors of Siena”; Southern Review: “The Ark” and “Night Light”; Zone 3: “The Porch.”
“The House” previously appeared in The Art of Gravity. Baton Rouge: Louisi- ana State University Press, 2011.
“The Door” appeared in Seven Hundred Kisses: A Yellow Silk Book of Erotic Writing. San Francisco: HarperOne, 1997.
“The Reader,” “The Sister,” and “The Fountain” appeared in Venera (Saratoga Springs, NY: Green Eye Press, 2001), a limited edition, handmade, and hand-set artist’s book created by Kate Leavitt, with her four-color intaglio prints.
Sections 1, 4, and 5 of “Mother and Child” appeared (as “Mother and Child”) in Hope, a National Visual Art and Poetry Exhibit, at the Peconic Gallery, River- head, New York, and the Rathbone Gallery, Albany, New York, and in the exhibi- tion catalog. “The Reader” and “The Vessel” also appeared online at Poetry Daily. “Laughter” and “The Table” were reprinted in Lake George Arts Project Literary Review; “Adirondack Scenic” and “Translati
ons” in Library Bound: A Saratoga Anthology; and “The Bride,” “The Light,” “The Mirror,” “The Queen,” “The Table,” and “The Virgin” in UnBottled.
I am grateful to the MacDowell Colony and especially to the Corporation of Yaddo for residencies during which I worked on many of these poems. The Janet Sloane/Alfred Z. Solomon Residency at Yaddo enabled me to write several key poems in the sequence Venera.
I also wish to thank Skidmore College’s faculty development committee for its generous support.
The Venera sequence would not exist without Penny Jolly’s inspiration and expertise. I am also indebted to the work of art historians Elisabeth Dhanens and Carol J. Purtle. For their encouragement and suggestions I owe thanks to Terry Diggory, Sandra Gilbert, Marilyn Hacker, Andrew Hudgins, B. D. Love, Amelia Rosner, and Steve Stern.