to them and like she’s come home so go about your days
in phantom pain as if your own life had been badly amputated
then badly sewn back but when you weary of it slip
into that room ease down on the bed the one she left
and left and left again when you lie down you choose the other
side you sleep in sleep your arm reaches to where her back
once curved you pull her impossibly toward you nest rest
like that but wherever it is she is she and all her creatures
sleep on uncomforted and alone
[Salt]
Encased in snow flakes breaking from cloud sky
falling still a practiced collapsing too cold to cling
fine and weightless waking again from dreams of you
cheeks and the slight hollows at the edge of sight
stained salt stained like the ground stained white
once the world thought snow and snow was all
it wanted humans salt the roads to make them safe
for travel an exit strategy part cold part slow bitter
ribbon white for journeying white for grief Carthage
sacked and salted and the Portuguese duke of Aviero’s
house pulled down his gardens sown with salt a stone
for betrayal saying here on this land nothing may be built
for all time I don’t want to spend the days in the fields
trying to plant the nights seeding the ground with salt
if memory is what I have I’d rather do without
[Dear god I ask]
nothing for myself as much of what I love is changed
to salt and stone and ocean only the meadows the deer
the flicker of trees in timelapse light flicker of trains
these endless metal departures dear lord I ask only this
for myself that the stars come evenings out of the black
dark sky the snow fall enough to muffle the ping of pipes
freezing in the walls that the barn dear lord I ask that
there always be a barn built of the carved up bones
the sky once leaned so heavily upon the wood weathered
into silver into slivers and whorls be indifferent to us
dear lord be gentle with your angels for they know
only how to fail sing lullabies to the broken the sleep
deprived the flailing failing the falling and the galloping
along sing lullabies to the storm climbing each horizon
neither bridle nor ever try to tame our beloved Leviathan
nor any one of your strange creatures let us run if that be
our desire let us run into grass and gale and sharp wire
fences into long crumbling afternoons let us run
back into what we thought was home even when
even though sometimes as now the barn be made
wholly be made entirely of fire
[Bezoar]
Tell me how to want this world this world that swallows
so much that sends so much of what I love into the ground
tell me how to want the rain again how to hope when
the rain has never fallen not once for 180 days tell me
how to want that ocean of days tell me how to love the graves
the ones we collect into grassy matched sets in dry green seas
and the others the ones we disperse into trees and creatures
as if ash were delicious as if when he said take eat he meant
burn this flesh to cinder for this is my body for this is
the future forget the blood the flesh the wind the wine
swallow instead every ground-down bone make of love make
of despair a bezoar make of the body a body make of a hole
a potion against the poison of all the days just now dawning
all the days of coming dust of hunger of nothing left to hunger for
[Wrong]
How the ground gives some things back cicadas for instance
how seventeen years of gone years of nowhere here years
of not cicada and now the swarm now frailglass wings and
now mouth and now devour the flowers too tucked sucked
back down coffined in their own pockets their purses of
save and wait wait all summer fall all winter and then again
they come somehow different somehow exactly the same
how worms curl nest and feast in fallen whalebone how not
one of them becomes the whale lost in the pressured dark
how the mouth of the river dies in the mouth of the ocean
this sad equation of water unequal to water how the swan’s
obscene neck curls in the muck like a question the world
keeps refusing to answer or always answers wrong
[Invocation]
And sometimes the soul quiets in the cells curls furls
idle silent and still sometimes the soul comes to rest
and what wakes after another night of darksinging skies
is star-nosed mole is maybe dormouse sparrow or wren
some creature of nearly no color nearly no consequence
a being entirely simply itself a being no longer in love
with its own event horizons the soul wakes tangled
in roads dirty with oceans and season under a sky
wan and pale the small furry soul pokes its head
into the cold is reborn sans teeth eats gravel small stones
for the quiet grinding deep inside oh small spidersilk soul
soul of the feathered frost and the good brown garden
sticky persistent soul small hollow-boned ghost of sky
and journey oh slight soul teach me how to hold on
to all of this teach me please oh lord how to let go
[Nest]
And I want to say that the heart hangs there at the end of things
wavering a little a bit unsteady this vessel this hotel for transients
this lodge that takes the shape of a wasp’s nest paper and swaying
and I want to say hey listen to this my body is a tree full of branchings
full of venom hum and sting full of wild creatures hunger leaves
and leavings hey listen I say hold that soft nautilus ear just so and
you can hear this colony collapse all the tiny dyings can hear
this lantern hung hissing and unlit when a light deserts its wick
the heart goes dark the heart becomes just one more vessel waiting
to sail waiting for the wind listen to the word vessel its desire
its desire to carry various cargoes its need to practice departures
hush now the sails are going up the sun is going down the people
on shore wave small scraps of fabric they’re white in the dusk
like wings they’re white in the dark like surrender
Notes
The quatrain that opens the book is from Heather McHugh’s poem “Etymological Dirge,” published in The Father of the Predicaments (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1999), 77.
The phrase Take, eat appears several places in the Bible (Matthew 26:26, I Corinthians 11:24, and Mark 14:22). They are Jesus’ words, spoken to his disciples at the Last Supper.
Ötzi is the name given to a well-preserved, ancient body found in a glacier in the Alps between Austria and Italy in 1991. He is Europe’s oldest human mummy.
The title of [Wilt thou play with him as with a bird] is from Job 41:5.
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose is the name of a painting by John Singer Sargent.
[Sirens] owes a debt to a draft of a poem by Sasha West.
[That] references a poem by Emily Dickinson, and also refers to what is inscribed on the gravestone of John Keats.
[Touch me now] references a line from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
[Actias luna] references a memorial cross on the grounds of
Sewanee: The University of the South. Actias luna is the Latin name for the luna moth.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the editors of the following journals, where some of these poems first appeared, sometimes in different forms.
Antioch Review: [I keep throwing words at the problem because words]
Barn Owl Review: [Once], [Venice]
The Bennington Review: [I would drive to your grave]
Birmingham Review: [Landscape with falling birds], [Salt]
Cherry Tree: [Practice], [That]
Connotation Press (A Poetry Congeries): [Otzi], [Over], [What I mean]
The Delmarva Review: [Parable], [Summa mathematica], [Wilt thou play with him as with a bird]
FIELD: [December]
Gulf Coast: [Was it ice]
The Kenyon Review: [There are things you love]
Kenyon Review Online: [Eve]
Narrative: [Charm for a spring storm]
The New Republic: [Stutter], [Things the realtor should not tell the new owner]
Pleiades: [Actias luna]
Plume: [To say]
Orion: [Parable]
Subtropics: [God speaks]
Water~Stone Review: [Imagine], [Wrong]
West Branch: [Because in all your life you’ve lived], [Bezoar], [Coda], [Sisyphus in love], [Take eat]
West Branch Wired: [Invocation], [The orphan child eats blueberries in Vermont]
Zocalo Public Square: [The horses], [Nest]
[Dear god I ask] was first published in the anthology Before the Door of God, edited by Jay Hopler and Kimberly Johnson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015), 381.
[Salt] is a limited edition broadside created by the Center for Book Arts in New York.
[That] was reprinted on Verse Daily.
[There are things you love] was reprinted on Poetry Daily.
To Mary Biddinger, Jon Miller, Amy Freels, and everyone at The University of Akron Press: My gratitude knows no bounds. Thank you for the care you have taken with my book.
Thanks to Mike O’Connell for the use of his gorgeous photograph.
My profound gratitude to the National Endowment for the Arts; Bucknell University, especially the faculty, staff, and fellows of the Stadler Poetry Center; The Massachusetts Cultural Council; The Maryland State Arts Council; the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference; the Sewanee Writers’ Conference; and the National Parks Service, especially Margaret Eissler and all the rangers, who shared their beloved Yosemite with me. These are gifts whose magnitude far exceeds their declared valued. This book would not exist without all of you.
It would also not exist without the faith and friendship of the beloved tribe, especially David Bergman, Jennifer Clarvoe, Michael Downs, Jehanne Dubrow, Michelle Gillette, Andrew Hudgins and Erin McGraw, Marsha Lucas, Amelia Ostroff, Diana Park, Hallie Richmond, Will Schutt and Tania Biancalani, Mark Strand, Lisa Sutton, Matt Thorburn, Katrina Vandenberg, Sasha West, Greg Williamson, and Peter Wool. And thanks to C—for the answers to all the questions.
Leslie Harrison holds graduate degrees from the Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Irvine. Her first book, Displacement, won the Bakeless Prize and was published by Mariner Books. A long-time resident of Sandisfield, Massachusetts, she now live and teaches in Baltimore.
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