tell me if this is all true

archive

[fluttering-slips]

Summer Stars

Bend low again, night of summer stars. So near you are, sky of summer stars, So near, a long-arm man can pick off stars, Pick off what he wants in the sky bowl, So near you are, summer stars, So near, strumming, strumming,                 So lazy and hum-strumming.

Carl Sandburg

[fluttering-slips]

To Don Juan

It was not love-why should I love you?- It was not folly, for I was wise, Yet when you looked at me, your looking Opened a kingdom to my eyes,

It was not love, it was not folly, I have no name to know it by, I only know one shining instant You held my earth, you held my sky.

Angela Manalang-Gloria

[fluttering-slips]

Now that I am Never Alone

In the bath I look up and see the brown moth

pressed like a pair of unpredictable lips

against the white wall. I heat up

the water, running as much hot in as I can stand.

These handfuls over my shoulder—how once

he pulled my head against his thigh and dipped

a rivulet down my neck of coldest water from the spring

we were drinking from. Beautiful mischief

that stills a moment so I can never look

back. Only now, brightest now, and the water

never hot enough to drive that shiver out.

But I remember solitude—no other

presence and each thing what it was. Not this raw

fluttering I make of you as you have made of me

your watch-fire, your killing light.

 TESS GALLAGHER

[fluttering-slips]

Devotion

Instead, the year begins

with my knees

              scraping hardwood,

another man leaving

              into my throat. Fresh snow

crackling on the window,

              each flake a letter

from an alphabet

              I’ve shut out for good.

Because the difference

              between prayer & mercy

is how you move

              the tongue. I press mine

to the navel’s familiar

              whorl, molasses threads

descending toward

              devotion. & there’s nothing

more holy than holding

              a man’s heartbeat between

your teeth, sharpened

              with too much

air. This mouth the last

              entry into January, silenced

with fresh snow crackling

              on the window.

& so what––if my feathers

              are burning. I 

never asked for flight.

              Only to feel

this fully, this

              entire, the way snow

touches bare skin––& is,

              suddenly, snow

no longer.

OCEAN VUONG

[fluttering-slips]

Emily Dickinson's Herbarium

Wide-lobed threes of trillium leaves taped and labeled, trifoliate veins, wrinkles dried and finite as her penciled marks beneath. My hands are attuned to the weight of pages pressed long on such fragile anatomies—pistils of lilies, cowslip petals, delphinium halos and bright spikes of iris, ovaries and ovules tenderly picked, patterned and splayed. I know the body of desire could fill a book and still spill out. It isn't a question of will, or killing for pleasure, for beauty that's flattened and lasts past the end of one season, where we've lived in bloom and hate to leave. Late February casts its defeatist light and I quit this reliquary now, this room.

Chelsea Woodard

[fluttering-slips]

Cochlear        

Regard

the wanting ear,

the dowager who tilts

her silver head nearer

the surgeon who considers

the elderly woman,

her dotage, her ear,

the moon—

all her phases—

how the moon

remaining whole

appears to wane,

how the woman

appearing whole

remains, does wane.

 Mary Elder Jacobsen

[fluttering-slips]

Ode of Girls’ Things

I loved the things that were ours—pink gloves, hankies with a pastoral scene in one corner. There was a lot we were not allowed to do, but what we were allowed to do was ours, dolls you carry by the leg, and dolls’  clothes you would put on or take off— someone who was yours, who did not have the rights of her own nakedness, and who had a smooth body, with its untouchable place, which you would never touch, even on her,       you had been cured of that. And some of the dolls had hard-rubber hands, with dimples, and though you were not supposed to, you could bite off the ends of the fingers when you could not stand it. And though you’d never be allowed to, say, drive a bus, or do anything that had to be done right, there was a teeny carton, in you, of eggs so tiny they were invisible. And there would be milk, in you, too—real milk! And you could wear a skirt, you could   be a bellflower—up under its cone the little shape like a closed buckle, intricate groove and tongue, where something like God’s power over you lived. And it       turned out you shared some things with boys— the alphabet was not just theirs— and you could make forays over into their territory, you could have what you could have because it was yours, and a little of what was theirs, because you took it. Much later, you’d have to give things up, too, to make it fair—long hair, skirts, even breasts, a pair of raspberry colored pumps which a friend wanted to put on, if they would fit his foot, and they did.

Sharon Olds

[fluttering-slips]

Cornucopia          

The nuns taught us that there were three kinds of kisses: peaches, prunes, and alfalfa. I said, I don't get it,  and you whispered: Say it out loud.

And I did, slowly, and blushed:  Peaches, pruuunes, al-fal-fa, my mouth moving in ways it hadn't moved before.

They wanted us to know the enemy. They wanted us to fear kisses the way we feared food, wanted us to find purity through hunger,

and it was true: we were terrified. But we already knew we weren't pure, not after the men had had their grabs, 

the ones on the bus, the sidewalk, the sneaky ones, the bold ones. We embraced, sitting frozen for an hour, unsure what else to do,  ruined by movies, the pressure of theater.

We listened to the beating of our dark hearts, had tried to cut the dark parts out of us, so we nursed each other's wounds and tasted fruit — 

the peaches, the prunes, blueberry, elderberry,  the dragon fruit, the kiwi, lime, lychee, the lemons,  the clementines, plums, tomatillos, our tongues delighted, acrobatic.

Done with hunger, tired of denial, we thundered upon each other and I never thought to ask: how would they know? Just trusted  the sisters, that they knew we were doomed.

Until I asked:  What would happen if I told her? If I weren't scared of my hunger? What if I let myself be full?  And we ate and it was good.

Jessica Manack

[fluttering-slips]

Tell Me

Tell me, dear beauty of the dusk,

   When purple ribbons bind the hill,

    Do dreams your secret wish fulfill,

Do prayers, like kernels from the husk

Come from your lips? Tell me if when

    The mountains loom at night, giant shades

    Of softer shadow, swift like blades

Of grass seeds come to flower. Then

Tell me if the night winds bend

    Them towards me, if the Shenandoah

    As it ripples past your shore,

Catches the soul of what you send.

 Jean Toomer

[fluttering-slips]

Love Comes Quietly

Love comes quietly, finally, drops about me, on me, in the old ways.

What did I know thinking myself able to go alone all the way.

Robert Creeley

[fluttering-slips]

(“Tell me if this is all true...”) X

Tell me if this is all true, my lover?         tell me if it is true. When the eyes of me flash their lightning on you,         dark clouds in your breast make stormy answer; Is it then true         that the dew drops fall from the night when I am seen,         and the morning light is glad when it wraps my body?

Is it true, is it true, that your love         travelled alone through ages and worlds in search of me?         that when you found me at last, your age—long desire         found utter peace in my gentle speech and my eyes and lips and flowing hair?

Is it then true         that the mystery of the Infinite is written on this little brow of mine?         Tell me, my lover, if all this is true!

[fluttering-slips]

Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem

My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers of my palms tell me so. Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish at the same time. I think

praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think staying up and waiting for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this is exactly what’s happening,

it’s what they write grants about: the chromodynamics of mournful Whistlers, the audible sorrow and beta decay of Old Battersea Bridge. I like the idea of different

theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass, a Bronx where people talk like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow kind, perhaps in the nook

of a cousin universe I’ve never defiled or betrayed anyone. Here I have two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back to rest my cheek against,

your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish. My hands are webbed like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed something in the womb

but couldn’t hang on. One of those other worlds or a life I felt passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother’s belly she had to scream out.

Here, when I say I never want to be without you, somewhere else I am saying I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you in each of the places we meet,

in all of the lives we are, it’s with hands that are dying and resurrected. When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life, in each place and forever. Bob Hicok

[fluttering-slips]

After Touching You, I Think of Narcissus Drowning

How desire is a thing I might die for. Longing a well, a long dark throat. Enter any body

of water and you give yourself up to be swallowed. Even the stones

know that. I have writhed against you as if against the black

bottom of a deep pool. I have emerged from your grip breathless

and slicked. How easily I could forget you

as separate, so essential you feel to me now. You

beneath me like my own blue shadow. You silent as the moon

drifts like a petal across your skin, my mouth

to your lip—you a spring I return to, unquenchable, and drink.

Leila Chatti

[fluttering-slips]

Born in the Rain         

I was born in the rain, pearls of perspiration embroidering the wavetops.

My husband was born in a deluge that washed out the shortcut his father took to the hospital, my mother-in-law torn by back labor, heart flooded with fear and unshed love.

Our son is a miscible liquid, both the estuary of our mingled waters and his own unknowable storm.

The sky opened on his life the moment we stepped out into it, droplets limning his lashes while I waited on the curb feeling fraudulent and grateful, unaware of the pain to come.

His eyes are the color of a slow, silt-soaked river: muddy Missouri, Mississippi molasses.

On my first birthday as a mother, I swaddle him on the porch swing as rain shakes the branches, his Mississippi eyes darting back and forth with the birds that are bending the air between trees.

The morning I was born, my mother gazed out the hospital window to see rain streaking the streetlights before returning to the vernix-streaked window of my face. Frances Klein

[fluttering-slips]

Desire & quiet moon          

The crush is fleshless & so it peeled  me, kicked up derma rubble released  into orbit, each face  is its own planet on their own  accord, in his face is petal republic  good as desire: peony, dahlia, oblivious  rose, chrysanthemum. My stomach  strums a pitiful ballad, my struggle  oval shaped, & I am beavertail, I lose  you for good as desire— love  is impossible to be in trouble  with, sit down if your head's on fire.

Dorothy Lune

[fluttering-slips]

Bird-Understander

Of many reasons I love you here is one

the way you write me from the gate at the airport

so I can tell you everything will be alright

so you can tell me there is a bird

trapped in the terminal      all the people

ignoring it       because they do not know

what to do with it       except to leave it alone

until it scares itself to death

it makes you terribly terribly sad

You wish you could take the bird outside

and set it free or       (failing that)

call a bird-understander

to come help the bird

All you can do is notice the bird

and feel for the bird       and write

to tell me how language feels

impossibly useless

but you are wrong

You are a bird-understander

better than I could ever be

who make so many noises

and call them song

These are your own words

your way of noticing

and saying plainly

of not turning away

from hurt

you have offered them

to me       I am only

giving them back

if only I could show you

how very useless

they are not

CRAIG ARNOLD

[fluttering-slips]

At the End, There Is Always a House

These days I move from room to room looking for a thing tohaunt. The filaments inside my teeth glow in the dark,thirty-two beacons no one will see, except the mirror Ireturn to again and again, hoping for it to swallow me, tofind anything there but my face. Mirror is another word forhunger. Hunger is another word for dead. Anyone would betired of hearing from me, the kind of woman — this repulsiveword — who'll never have a garden or greenhouse, only afridge crisper full of broccoli and kale and lettuce, allrotting to sludge, bananas on the counter blackening likefrostbitten skin. I used to quarter an apple with suchperfection I could have been autopsying my own heart. Thething is there's no way out of this house. Memory circleslike flies. Even the dead need to eat. Even the dead dream. Ileft a note in the memory: You deserve so much more thandesire.

Sara Eliza Johnson