Lily Herman @ancientchrome - Tumblr Blog

January 23, 2018

That which started in June and ends in nothing

Just because with only one man between the two of us, we have undone what no man could supposedly put asunder, does not mean I don’t still want to know what happens next on The Wire just because we began watching it together

We divide our assets fairly and I see no reason why you should wrench even this from me especially mid-season when all of my favorite characters keep baring their chests and then dying

Maybe this is what becomes of unions that begin inside the state but without God

Moment of satisfaction, sanctified by a pain brittle and shineless

That which rots in June and is fodder for winter

I ask a woman why she doesn’t just move to northern California if she wants this weather to last all year and she says No, it shakes too much out there and I want to ask her If not shaking, then what do you call this

1/16 and 1/17 January 2018

In a dark house I am finally sleeping to name you in dreams:

As before, there was after this, now for a story, there is only before

Culling the synthesis of a bird and its call separated by sky

Jewels that year faced God and were blue but not weeping

Vastness we compress into a question Horizon eaten by a bird and back

Requisite dreams, requisite dance, the unheeded river to which we walk parallel

The beast we talk about soothing has never named us as either heir apparent or prey

Onto a table a baby is born Onto a floor a baby is born Until the table a baby can still be myth

Phosphorus, basalt, the earths rising inside one another

Zealous at the window Our hearth run not by the fates, but the odds

Stations of the cross depicted equilaterally as never before Not only gone but gored Not what we are but what countries we’ve come through still being it

Body of a woman sung backward to deputize her love

Elevation replacing poise

Don’t remember what you can’t remember

For our fruit we eat from the trees for our meat we fast and fast

Kept, we are kept

Lily. Lily. Lily. Lily, don’t you have any ambition? Don’t you have an extra towel? Didn’t your great grandmother’s kitchen have no two tiles the same color and all her babies turned out fine?

Good. You are moving and will stay that way.

Manic spirit, siren spirit, on this distracted island we stop asking the route home

Xerxes, consulting his clock, makes time out of us

World past repair, the cracked jar straining toward its own restoration Queen for a day abdicates even this

You asked me to stop speaking to you and only write, as if what saves me would have you also

Under the flesh of winter lie our muscles, warm and incalculable

How much glass can be broken in a single day before the day breaks, too

On January 8 to begin

The meaning of premonition is not, We’re going to be together forever.

It’s more like: I knew without looking that the woman’s napkin would be in her lap. More used than expected. More used than necessary, for what she is eating.

Now that we have signed the foremost piece of paper that insists on a future, we are hesitant to put our names to anything else. They know enough now about where to find us and what we’ll be doing when we’re found.

A toy train runs above our heads, though you point out it is inexplicably being pulled by its caboose. We find this oversight to be frustrating but mortally relatable.

The waitress is tired of making decisions for you the same way you claim to be tired of making decisions for me. You nicknamed me Toad, then Turtle, as if it was unclear whether or not I would choose to live on land. As for turtles, I tell you, our initial moment of tepid exploration is not necessarily an indication of how we will eventually leave the shell behind.

On the way home, when your car breaks down, nothing can be found wrong with it, except for the fact that you touched it.

The car is two years older than us and we are the same age, an age that is increasingly notated solely as getting older. We push it to the side of the road, the three of us ancient combined and dignified in our struggle.

The meaning of premonition is not that three people we know will be struck hard by their separate fates today, but that when they are we will sleep like family

and talk about anything except what we will be

LATITUDE

As for the reach of influence as we’ve grown accustomed to it, he says, Grandma’s being used in a proxy war

Unlike other earth signs who will be buried in argument, I can easily admit that I’m wrong

Like when you said the Giants and I thought you meant the grocery store

Or when I thought the 49ers were named for the city’s coordinates, when really it was the year of the gold rush

The assumptions we make about ourselves all end in -ing, as we fight to decipher the difference between what is metaphorical and what is physically impossible

Who eats and who starves on whose dollar

In the shadow of the prison yard is always where a woman speaks, without listing the names she was tortured for remembering The names she tortures herself to forget

When we are alone we must not be anything else

We not contributing are unhappy

On the first day of the year I saw one fox which is rare and therefore meant to be good luck, eating another fox, which is rarer still but cannot be said to portend the same sky

A man with ice in his beard shouts Happy New Year and I’m thinking 2018 is the year of the gold rush

In the name of running after false promise because it shined at us and made the vast country seem small by our desire to cross over

LATITUDE

As for the reach of influence as we’ve grown accustomed to it, he says, Grandma’s being used in a proxy war

Unlike other earth signs who will be buried in argument, I can easily admit that I’m wrong

Like when you said the Giants and I thought you meant the grocery store

Or when I thought the 49ers were named for the city’s coordinates, when really it was the year of the gold rush

The assumptions we make about ourselves all end in -ing, as we fight to decipher the difference between what is metaphorical and what is physically impossible

Who eats and who starves on whose dollar

In the shadow of the prison yard is always where a woman speaks, without listing the names she was tortured for remembering The names she tortures herself to forget

When we are alone we must not be anything else

We not contributing are unhappy

On the first day of the year I saw one fox which is rare and therefore meant to be good luck, eating another fox, which is rarer still but cannot be said to portend the same sky

A man with ice in his beard shouts Happy New Year and I’m thinking 2018 is the year of the gold rush

In the name of running after false promise because it shined at us and made the vast country seem small by our desire to cross over

What was dry we had a name for: Wellspring, daughter, anthem advocating catch and release

Walk directly into the water of these woods The west once won but thereafter surrendered

Only to be us Only to be nameless us on the flower-limned streets of our changing names

I have no stomach for my heart

This pain I can come up with Ancient of me, is that you begged me to see the salt of you in what was then only an ocean

What was wet we had a name for What was dry went on forever

Once on the mountain I got married and it was morning like for my mother

Once I learned to alleviate the strain by leaning forward on the incline

Once I drank brown liquor mixed with a cup of snow and in this way did not find love but also did not freeze before morning

The horses were always named for their fathers like the rest of us But once they were ranked by region, not breed

Even answering Proust I can’t be forthright I say, when it comes to virtue and vice all I know is that you told me I am so understanding that it almost constitutes treachery

The question Has something been lost losing some of its meaning each time it is translated

What is suffering of woman compared to death of woman What is suffering of woman, anyway

Some years passing Some years staying the same A map hung on the wall by a knife in its most vulnerable set of coordinates

Moss displaced Body bent by eclipse Spoken three times and believed not once

10 10 10 10 10 10

The month of October makes use of itself

I am writing as a way to keep following you after you have gone

I emerge from the woods A monster of slaughtered branches and deer

My tongue a turtle’s My tongue curious and dry mobbing the corners of my mouth

I wonder what my last name can be after living for so long underwater

The remaining warmth of me meets the idea of death still warming on your mind

This hearth is a gunshot widening in the wake of one bullet shot barely askance of the last

What is recalibration What is equal distribution in a house of shifting size and absolute hunger

You asked what you could do to make one once-writing woman write again and I said, Complicate my heart

You tell me I am a set of teeth Disembodied from the head and still biting

At my heels is my heart In my clothes rises the star of my rot I say, an artist paints what commits him To the work and then the ward He names it My Eyes at the Moment of the Apparitions* which is to say we are all painting self portraits that face out

To fall in love in such a way that creates rather than answers our questions

What we hold in contempt We still hold

*title of painting by German artist August Natterer

You tell me I am a set of teeth Disembodied from the head and still biting I say, an artist paints what commits him To the work and then the ward He names it My Eyes at the Moment of the Apparitions*

which is to say we are all painting self portraits that face out

What we hold in contempt We still hold

*title of painting by schizophrenic German artist August Natterer

11 October 2017

Becoming culpable in translation:

The word for mine is different than what is ours Metallurgically, it manifests as a ring, the enamel table upon which every new generation is delivered and fed, an animal not nomadic but adaptive

Every day, my eyes become less adjusted to light and its manipulations

At the stove I have been scared to be a woman or being a woman scared to love what I remember of it

Your body beneath cotton Your body a boat set adrift with a silk flag and no sail

Tell me what I love so that I can say it and be understood

If the shoe fits wear it But not all the time That’s how shoes get worn out

The mathematics of an hour: I write a poem for your kind and manage to find my face among their number I shave my legs

While in the front room you oil a gun and try to keep it from jamming, sand the magazine, both of us grinding down to the smoothest possibility preparing for we don’t know what moment

After the first day among the ghosts of this as any other mill town,

We go to the casino and quickly lose $100 each As if in a bid for the sanctity versus fragility of our tiny democracy

As if to say We have equal stakes in this Not everything can be even but this is already nicely scored to snap

FASTIDIOUS

Me an animal who can’t admit it Me glasslike, spring-loaded, her asking Is this working for you and him saying Solve for x when the answer to both questions is somehow simultaneously undefined and 3

A petition to replace one-half of my liver with a plum For the sake of what country carrying on what family name The banner, to bleed and function

September 20-21, 2017

Today, without the ballast of the family’s lonely crest, I break into a run

I drink coffee into which cream does not assimilate and toast her, the woman who makes your bed while I build a house upon you

For ten minutes, I couldn’t remember how old I was and now that the information is recovered to me, it remains glassy and irrelevant below the surface of an ocean that I am meant to take as truth or to care for as for an infant

There are questions I never thought I’d ask, like Is the Beretta also a .22? Questions like Do you take this woman? which other people ask for me, third parties whose investment in the story is minimal, but whose legacy remains Good looking out

And questions I had never anticipated at first glance, but which turn the pages for us now, the wrinkle in her forehead eschewing her youth and his adulthood to ask, Did you take the pills through which you achieve sleep Did you take the pills which wake and are new with you

I cannot cover your reasons for marrying me with my reasons for marrying at all It is like trying to nest one barely-understood galaxy into another

The trouble with writing poems is that you have to go through the body That nation of bureaucrats and siphoners

Having prepared to handle what I did not want I feel robbed when it never arrives

I am not sorry for the body you are trying to obey

What you want to be given by the life you’ve given everything

In math, the word intercept implies the point at which we finally cross the line where nothing is allowed to exist

You want advice and I say, The tonic is a poem that loves yourself, composed as if someone else is holding the camera Someone else always is

I want advice which really means I don’t ever want to die, and you say Pretend this world no longer exists, but that for your part you haven’t noticed the change

Citroën

You talk about lemon laws

How if you buy a car that for some mysterious reason has been prone since its birth to malfunction you get to return it And how in most states you have the right to refuse any questions on the subject

In terms of hope, you tell me, There will be no promises but you don’t claim to speak for the whole universe and when I lift my lowered head there is a dragonfly who doesn’t know his own good omen who doesn’t know a monster when he sees one and flits close to me

What is it about grief that augments sex until the body is a museum visited again and again by the same tourist who foregos any exhibition to instead stare at his own reflection in the bathroom mirror, say it was worth every penny, and arrive promptly again at visiting hours the next morning

What is it about grief that doesn’t stop us tinkering with our words Hoping to return them, to find some way out of ever having owned them

A word croaks out barbed and yellow to gash at the body below

Do you still love me in a way that uses all the surface area of your heart

Is it offensive my belief that more often than not it is an antique car whose engine is basically good through whose rusted floor we thrust our feet

Or the astronaut’s credo People don’t come back from space invalidated by gravity

When you told me, If I can’t make it work with you there is truly no hope for me That was a different day That was a car you won’t allow me to put in reverse to talk about this

You say, those words don’t apply here Out here we make our own law

What if I never stop cooking onions in too much oil and scooping them directly into mouths who claim this simple action is more than they know about how to feed themselves

What if I sacrifice more of my ego Not because I started with less but because I can

Like giving away one kidney with considerable pain but no less function

It is a prerequisite for a poet that a little bit, you want to die

That only one hand says, Death to the king, While the other says, Edit

How can anyone grow bored with all the ways one woman can be beautiful

How can anyone write a love poem in Baltimore As a word it can’t be translated As a practice it can’t be forgiven

I wouldn’t say Glutton for punishment I would say An acquired taste for punishment

A radio built of discontinued parts puts to music the headline In a ration economy, even fear is a vice

A voice is still trying to unite the east with Europe on a wind no longer sour from the last war It says, The rule is, In this house, I am the full person I want to be

Otherwise I can’t take my shoes off and relax Otherwise what is this country for

Remembering permission for a long poem I can relax back into you: On one occasion patrolling the border between here and madness, I made your face last for three years and after, kept its imprint burning in the darkness for at least another two

Once I walked calf-deep for seven miles in a river which like me was renamed at the last minute by a committee who lacked our same basic sensibilities

I wore your clothes and under them a flag and somewhere between these two countries trembled my own unaligned skin

I consult a compass with only two directions: North and out

I make the choice for both of us A man does not stop to ask directions from his horse If the horse has again and again saved his life he knows it is by chance and that an animal’s singular navigational instinct is the word home clicked as a wet syllable into the long ear always arcing to hear it

A mountain pass buried by blizzard, the only hope for quinine lost across the ridge, a woman too sick to properly perform the nuance between waiting for a miracle and waiting for death

If we are diligent all our lives the reward is the great retelling in the sky

At 10PM, you are already in bed when I say Happy September because all day I walked around still believing in August

Five years ago to the day, I wished for the first time upon this month I voted for it to change everything and moved to a snowlocked city through which gems were once hauled, though now only coal passes there

Now we live quietly as do all repentant mountains who wish to live out their days in peace and not be reminded that they were formed first by eruption

What happens when the rules of engagement are set upon by an army Infidel yes But mercenary no

The movement of a body from one side of the bed to another is also a ground war that wants winning

As the city is evacuated into its distant hills who bothers to tithe, brush teeth, name babies in keeping with the saints under whose auspices they are born

Who keeps a calendar of their own dying

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Lily Herman