*
When I look to the past, I see only perplexing things:
a flask emptied by thirst
miniature beckoning mouths, as sleepless as
open eyes
(where is the
compass?)
Embracing the whole garden first,
then holding the parts close
So I went on the whole night–
Reverie leaving a mark on
skin, small burst of
a whisper, a cloudy puff—
fetal burden in the eye
*
She calls to me:
real
each blur
coral
swollen bud
eyelid
Bruised trance:
translation which
makes no
divine assignment
*
And the next morning, with its tiny dead strewn everywhere,
morning in which I swore I’d been lost
(Lostness being emptyhandedness
seed-dust,
translucence)
Me, my Other,
we step out from flesh, bone, arched eyebrow
(It is always the other who makes way through the crowd)
Pecking at me, caressing me from the black forest of orange blossoms
So we are to marry —
Incite: Other and I
*
It’s not that it can’t be explained, but
the diffidence, inadequacy of explanation
the ring, and the ring over the ring on my finger
Unwind the gauze around the wound
as a sort of betrothal
I did not do it
I did not dare to rise, I
unravel, resurrect
The woven leaves, the private lushness,
a quiet left to scamper without recognition
(a little lilac, a little grim)
*
This outrageous murmur
wherein
herein
I did see my golem, my other: first stone, then clay, then wood, the
(Other’s own stories softening in
my hands)
waving away intimacies
when the body embraces its revulsion
(Under its ribs
eating sacramental fog)
*
Pressing
Other’s muscles onto the view,
like
the sweet monster of another story,
retold
where
the season’s change is our disaster
whose
“sin” refers to an encounter between two creatures of different species
who
make love by a feeling of fullness:
gestational,
nauseous
*
And are displaced
(but our meeting is re-lived in
calm
as though a lens had been
inserted between the event and its unfolding)
A
knife of carnations
its
vagrant flame
whose sin refers to black feathers
curling from the heat
of
noiseless, ruddy record
Each
embrace a transformation,
malediction
and blessing wearing the same pretty gown
*
I
eat my own perfume as temporary sorrow
I
am rebuilding
setting
the table with little stained plates
so my
stranger will arrive
The
border of beauty and refuse
rises
up to a nearly invisible line
Arriving,
the Other seems to be scrutinizing miniature landscapes
or
else meditating intensely
*
She
is a saint of these parts,
made of the most mobile and
responsive wax,
whose eyes
blink tears in the glare of the
sun
She who appeared to me,
followed
and almost brushed
against me
Whose accidents of touch, mumbled
apologies,
a sinister gray eros
Hers, an altar I left reluctant
with a tooth worn on a string,
a piece of insect held as a charm, my fist closing around it
*
The candles are streaming
A jar
filled with honey
explodes with its sweetness,
there is broken glass everywhere
Gluey
transparencies belabor themselves in silence
*
Emboldened,
intoxicated
tempting us to the lushness of a cliff
where the earth opens up, lets out nameless beings:
nameless only because we will not christen them
but sketch their images on our skin:
Peaches that are dark, ochre and pink
Ominous rosebuds
Susanne Dyckman’s most recent collection of poetry is A Dark Ordinary (Furniture Press Books). She is also the author of equilibrium’s form (Shearsman Books) and three chapbooks, Counterweight, Transiting Indigo, and Source. Her work has been published in a variety of journals, and a collaboration with Elizabeth Robinson is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. She has co-edited both Five Fingers Review and Instance Press, and curated the Evelyn Ave. reading series. She lives and writes in Albany, California.