The Winds and the Open Spaces

The poetry blog of kateydidit (KM).

[kateywroteit]

Because They Got To You First

I should have made my way straight to you long ago. -W.W.

So someone told you that you were a monster and you believed them. It happens. You must have built this house of the things they said of you —   the things I think you came to love — and you’ve lived here too long. Well, it’s a rotten house, you know, no guilt in me for saying it —  you ought to move away from here, this place so ugly, overgrown, so sick with stink you’d think it was an old man’s armpit —   listen, this ain’t a cave and you can’t stay here anymore. Call this an eviction but until you go I’m barging in, I’m eating up all your filth and chewing it loud, I’m sneaking up behind you and blowing in your ears, compliments mostly, I’m breathing them down your neck in hallways you thought yourself alone in —   just call this house haunted, call me a ghost, call this an eviction but you’re getting out. This is confusing you, I know. You don’t get why I’m here. It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry I’m late.

-KM 5.27.2015.

[kateywroteit]

To You

Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of      dreams, I fear these supposed realities are to melt from      under your feet and hands, Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade,      manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes,      dissipate away from you, Your true soul and body appear before me, They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce,      shops, work, farms, clothes, the house, buying,      selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying. Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that      you be my poem, I whisper with my lips close to your ear, I have loved many women and men, but I love none      better than you. O I have been dilatory and dumb, I should have made my way straight to you long ago, I should have blabb'd nothing but you, I should have      chanted nothing but you. I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you, None has understood you, but I understand you, None has done justice to you, you have not done      justice to yourself, None but has found you imperfect, I only find no      imperfection in you, None but would subordinate you, I only am he who will      never consent to subordinate you, I only am he who places over you no master, owner,      better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in      yourself. Painters have painted their swarming groups and the      centre-figure of all, From the head of the centre-figure spreading a nimbus      of gold-color'd light, But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head      without its nimbus of gold-color'd light, From my hand from the brain of every man and woman it      streams, effulgently flowing forever. O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! You have not known what you are, you have slumber'd      upon yourself all your life, Your eyelids have been the same as closed most of the      time, What you have done returns already in mockeries, (Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not      return in mockeries, what is their return?) The mockeries are not you, Underneath them and within them I see you lurk, I pursue you where none else has pursued you, Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the      night, the accustom'd routine, if these conceal      you from others or from yourself, they do not      conceal you from me, The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure      complexion, if these balk others they do not      balk me, The pert apparel, the deform'd attitude, drunkenness,      greed, premature death, all these I part aside. There is no endowment in man or woman that is not      tallied in you, There is no virtue, no beauty in man or woman, but as      good is in you, No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in      you, No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure      waits for you. As for me, I give nothing to any one except I give      the like carefully to you, I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God,      sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of      you. Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard! These shows of the East and West are tame compared to      you, These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, you      are immense and interminable as they, These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature,      throes of apparent dissolution, you are he or      she who is master or mistress over them, Master or mistress in your own right over Nature,      elements, pain, passion, dissolution. The hopples fall from your ankles, you find an      unfailing sufficiency, Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by      the rest, whatever you are promulges itself, Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are      provided, nothing is scanted, Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui,      what you are picks its way.

-Walt Whitman

[kateywroteit]

A Certain Demeter Speaks

I. I think I am drawn to people who live half in the underworld. (I have many friends. They have been ready to die a long time.) In the whisper of night I steal the coins they put under their tongues before they sleep. This way the boatman cannot be paid and when they come to me asking for the things that they have lost I can catch them and hold them fast. This is the way to steal someone from the dead, I am told, but I have tried it. It is not that simple. My hands brought close go through them like shadow, my lungs pass through the place where they stood. And they return below.

II. They say she has always made for a good poem — romantic. So easy these days to imagine themselves darkling when the air goes cold, to suck the ripe seed-juices and have to stay in the land where the voices of the dead sing to them like hollow bottles in the wind. (They forget I know voices too. I know how they creep into your mouth when you are not looking. I know it is easier for them to take her voice into their mouths than mine because hers just feels more at home there — less an invasion, less things they do not want to hear.) They tell me she chose this, as if this makes it better. This does not make it better.

III. Listen — you should know that I want many things from you. I want to feel your footprint in the spaces I am walking. I want to watch you laugh the birds back to the sky, I want to think, So this is what not losing you feels like. I want to watch the spring roll back across the land, the bloom of wheat and grape; I want to trust that if I keep going without you, you will still be behind me; I want to hold you, and not let my palms slip through. I know that none of these things are easy for you. Somedays, on cold days, I try to help; I pray to you, I offer many things. (Somedays, I even think you hear me.) I take my numb fingers, my bones, for you I press my fists into the ground, I send my voice into the earth, I will it to break open for you                                                         again.

-KM 4.30.2015. (Poetry Month 30/30)

[kateywroteit]

A Nightmare

In the dream I knew I was asleep, and was dreaming, and you were dead, your brown eyes snuffed out like a candle, and I hadn’t seen it happen, and you were dead and I had only been told —   they said your neck had snapped like a whip, broken quick,  and so you were dead before I even arrived —   and I knew this to be true. You were dead outside of my sleeping, and these were the facts: I had never seen you go and you were dead and this meant you were a thing I would never see again living. How could I wake, come alive into a world where you were dead, where the gap between your teeth would lie enclosed in your dead mouth forever — god, I can’t, I can’t write this — and I woke,  sobbing into my hands ‘till my fingers dripped that broken song, rhythmic, crying you were dead, you were dead, you were dead— and I called you up and somehow, impossibly, you were fine.

-KM 4.29.2015. (Poetry Month 29/30)

[kateywroteit]

To Shirts that Show the Midriff I’ve Hidden Since Grade School

I don’t recall just when it began to matter, when childish chub became a thing to cover sweater-clad instead of a body not to notice — and even now when roundness has smoothed into curves, I’ve been ashamed to bare my skin. The bit of stomach sag, the softness of my center gives me pause, and I think of my mother, she whose belly bore into being three girls grown brilliant, and yet it is this part of her in which she cannot see the strength — the beauty — I will never understand this, and yet I inherited this lack of body love — though the photos of me, so small, just starting to feel ugly, do not reveal an unpretty girl — and these things become clear, and I don a shirt rib-short, and I go outside.

-KM 4.28.2015. (Poetry Month 28/30)

[kateywroteit]

To the Twitch

He twitches when he falls asleep, and this is how I know he’s dozed: the kicking of limbs soft like a puppy in nightmare. I rest my writing hand on his chest and feel the muscles pulse to the touch — I like to think it is his heart, clamoring out to reach me, to be close as mine pressed tight against his naked back (to romanticize is what the poet in me does; this comes so easy)  —and I do this too, sometimes, the half-gone cotton warmth of brain still aware of the jump — so to twitch, to fall asleep first and lose that primitive fear, to trust they won’t hurt you — oh it must be love — and our legs shake, and we drift off under canopy sails, watching the guiding stars themselves twitch in the sky.

-KM 4.27.2015. (Poetry Month 27/30)

[kateywroteit]

A Lullaby

In the dim light of beforesleep you glow like the sun, eyes drifting lazy to close and open and hand wandering warm along the paths of my heart. Such beautiful hands, the elongated fingers pushing your warmth into ribs, hips, the calm of you seeping into me at the cracks and joints ‘till — well, ‘till forget the poem, you’re waiting. That’s poem enough.

-KM 4.26.2015. (Poetry Month 26/30)

[kateywroteit]

A Memory

I am thirteen years old this day, and I sit on my bed, bright yarn unspooled in my lap. I am sobbing, and this is distracting, inconvenient for this thing I must do, yanking out fistfuls of careful crochet stitches colliding into one another cascading together into a brilliant pile of unmade things, the things I’ve always got wrong. They were crooked. The edges went askew like quizzical heads and it began to shrink on me and I pulled and pulled, desperation and shame clawing at me like wild things that kill and I let the tears run and arms jerk hours of craft apart into my waiting lap — I want to reach back, still her hands, what I want to say is that it won’t always be like this choking feeling in her throat but it will always feel like pulling, yanking desperately at a line until the flaws unravel the flawless whole, giving it up to the mess, until you sit, empty and covered in tangled rainbow.

-KM 4.25.2015. (Poetry Month 25/30)

[kateywroteit]

A Christening

And so I call you poetry, a thing that once was not now made solid vessel; I will fill you with words like pouring dirty water through a sieve and I will catch that dirt, make clay, make these lines well-formed as pottery, and you will be beautiful as pottery — poetry, I have given you this new home but the choice of that which clothes you is less important than that which lives inside, than that which you are: the mere stamp of my mind, in all its infirmity, waiting to be given its blessing.

-KM 4.24.2015. (Poetry Month 24/30)

[kateywroteit]

To a Dead Bird

I’m walking along the street we call Kentucky-is-the-shortcut and it’s late and I’m tired and in the gutter there lies one dead bird, not the kind that looks graceful crumpled and sad but the kind swarming with ants with bloody chunks of muscle and gut open to the sky it once loved. Maybe a swoop was cut short by that street on which I too almost perished, the one that doesn’t say stop but should and cars go careening past like untethered souls — and this bothers me, with all the birds in my hair and heart, the sight of one dead in the road, so thinking of rivers so toxic they burn I let myself become infected, pick up the gristle and stinking fat of this dead thing I maybe lost, and carry it home, one more of my skulls calling out to be saved.

-KM 4.23.2015. (Poetry Month 23/30)

[kateywroteit]

To Night-Driving

It feels like flying through ink  and shadow, the rush of the world dropped to a hush, halted, you and the road slipping together till smooth. Nothing is familiar but the night-paths you drove when last you needed air, needed the noise and people to transform to cars parked and not driven. This is your place, you know this. Slick machine, paved crunch of street, these things become all things, surroundings opened so wide that the space between streetlamps becomes like floating, a drifting explorer in the dark                                               between stars.

-KM 4.22.2015. (Poetry Month 22/30)

[kateywroteit]

A Dedication

On your twenty-second birthday

To scattered scribbles hastily jotted,      appointments, tidbits, factoids and notes; To half-sketched pictures, spotted and smudged,      and artful imprints, and ink, and graphite; To your words, to the place where they live;      descriptions, poems, our friends      and their laughter, and their words too; To adventures not yet recorded — yours, or ours, or To letters to me, waiting here to welcome you home.

-KM 4.21.2015. (Poetry Month 21/30)

[tinyghosthands]

I write down words because I am a speaking animal who will die, who is descended from dead animals who were made the same way. Words are little holes you can poke your eyes through to touch the dead (if you are reading). If you are writing they are the little holes you poke your hand through to touch people when they’re walking over your grave. (See Keats.) I try to be nice to the living ones, the readers, even though as a dead animal I have to envy them somewhat. Also I try to scare them a little, to keep things lively (so to speak). Already a dead animal I try also to be a dumb one. That’s not right though; I am talking all the time. Dumb as in silly as in I THINK YOU WILL TALK BACK.

Heather Christle, “WORDS ARE HOLES & A POET’S A DEAD ANIMAL THAT SPEAKS,” published in Evening Will Come (via myshoesuntied)

[kateywroteit]

To the Living

“By his skill in Necromancy, he hath a Power of calling whom he pleaseth from the Dead, and commanding their Service for twenty-four Hours, but no longer; nor can he call the same Person up again in less than three Months, except upon every extraordinary Occasions.” -Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

You discovered it by chance: a long shot on a dark day and you cried his name, willed him into flesh, and he was. How the unsaid breathes, the reasons die when death 

is cast aside, an ill-fitting cloak — even good reasons go. And this was good enough, the hours when you could pretend you’d never felt him burn — felt fever 

steal him away like kissing breath out of body, the way you never would — and now you have, and it was good enough, and his tongue vanishes from in your mouth and your arms 

collapse upon themselves and you can’t even taste him anymore. Something about screaming helps. And you scream, you screech his name, you’ve been going hoarse 

for months and then his tongue is on yours again, suddenly, like he never left you, like you’re not three months older, like it’s always going to happen this way.

-KM 4.20.2015. (Poetry Month 20/30)

[kateywroteit]

To the Unspoken

The boy in the purple shirt is waiting for the chance to say something. He does not know this. You, the man of words, cannot say anything to let him know you see it, that you know the way his heart aches through his gritted teeth and fists, uncaging his fettered tongue like unrolling through a maze. You let this be, say easy other things — love him curve of jaw puzzling, the eye-wrinkle waking — oh, he breaks your heart, that beautiful boy, dying to release these words at last, deliver them finally to someone who will use them right.

-KM 4.19.2015. (Poetry Month 19/30)

[kateywroteit]

To a Friend With My Name

You are asleep on my shoulder, breathing finally gone slow, and you feel like porcelain, the figure of a girl my mother might have bought, but once-dropped, the seams where something chipped at you poorly glued — you’re not okay today, this is true, a little too far from home,      too close to too much else — but you sleep, and it feels, finally, like making something whole.

-KM 4.18.2015. (Poetry Month 18/30)

[kateywroteit]

To Public School Kids

The trouble is, we have no more rooms to let you grow into. The trouble is, we can’t help you anyway. And we’re trying, pressing our fists to your rough heels to lift, but someone keeps snatching us away, berries too ripe gobbled up greedy summertime, spoiled, don’t ask me where this goes I’m trying to feed you the universe — point is you’ve got to take a tumble, kid, and we— we have to show you how high you could have gone.

-KM 4.17.2015. (Poetry Month 17/30)