Lucie Brock-Broido

Tell the truth I told me                                When I couldn’t speak. Sorrow’s a barbaric art, crude as a Viking ship                Or a child Who rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer In the 1930s                                       Toward the iron lung of polio. According to the census I am unmarried                And unchurched. The woman in the field dressed only in the sun. Too far gone to halt the Arctic Cap’s catastrophe, big beautiful Blubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of  ice. I am obliged, now, to refrain from dying, for as long as it is possible. For whom left am I first? We have come to terms with our Self Like a marmoset getting out of  her Great Ape suit.

What makes you think I’m an eccentric, he said, in London To the rag of the reporters who had gathered to report On his eccentricities — the tin sink light enough for traveling, but Deep enough to swallow his exquisite hands in water filled with ice. A budgerigar accompanies, perched atop the fugue of Hindemith. You are trembling now like the librarian reading To herself out loud in her Arctic room Composed entirely of snow. A broadcast (high fidelity) bound by the quiet of the land and The Mennonite who told him We are in this world, but are not of this world, You see. From the notebook of  your partial list of symptoms, phobias: Fever, paranoia, polio (subclinical), ankle-foot phenomenon, The possibility of  bluish spots. Everything one does is fear Not being of this world or in this world enough. There is no world I know, without some word of   it.

No feeding on wisteria. No pitch-burner traipsing In the nettled woods. No milk in metal cylinders, no Buttering. No making small contusions on the page But saying nothing no one has not said before. No milkweed blown across your pony-coat, no burrs. No scent of juniper on your Jacobean mouth. No crush Of ink or injury, no lacerating wish. Extinguish me from this. I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost And flickering in unison with all the other fireflies in Appalachia, Blinking in the swarm of it, and all at once, above And on a bare branch in a shepherd's sky.    No Dove. There is no thou to speak of.

If my own voice falters, tell them hubris was my way of adoring you. The hollow of the hulk of you, so feverish in life, cut open, Reveals ten thousand rags of music in your thoracic cavity. The hands are received bagged and examination reveals no injury. Winter then, the body is cold to the touch, unplunderable, Kept in its drawer of old-world harrowing. Teeth in fair repair. Will you be buried where; nowhere. Your mouth a globe of gauze and glossolalia. And opening, most delft of blue, Your heart was a mess— A mob of hoofprints where the skittish colts first learned to stand, Catching on to their agility, a shock of freedom, wild-maned. The eyes have hazel irides and the conjunctivae are pale, With hemorrhaging. One lung, smaller, congested with rose smoke. The other, filled with a swarm of massive sentimentia. I adore you more. I know The wingspan of your voice, whole gorgeous flock of harriers, Cannot be taken down. You would like it now, this snow, this hour. Your visitation here tonight not altogether unexpected. The night-laborers, immigrants all, assemble here, aching for to speaking, Longing for to work.

Mouthful of earth, hair half a century silvering, who buried him. With what. Make a fist for heart. That is the size of it. Also directives from our  DNA. The nature of  his wound was the clock-cicada winding down. He wound down. July, vapid, humid: sails of sailboats swelled, yellow boxes Of   cigars from Cuba plumped. Ring fingers fattened for a spell. Barges of coal bloomed in heat. It was when the catfish were the only fish left living In the Monongahela River. Though there were (they swore) no angels left, one was stillbound in The very drawer of salt and ache and rendering, its wings wrapped-in By the slink from the strap Of his second-wife’s pearl-satin slip, shimmering and still As one herring left face-up in its brine and tin. The nature of  his wound was muscadine and terminal; he was easy To take down as a porgy off the cold Atlantic coast. In the old city of   Brod, most of the few Jews left Living may have been still at supper while he died. That same July, his daughters’ scales came off in every brittle Tinsel color, washing To the next slow-yellowed river and the next, toward west, Ohio-bound. This is the extent of that. I still have plenty heart.

On abandon, uncalled for but called forth. The hydrangea Of   her crushed each year a little more into the attar of   herself. Pallid. Injured, wildly capable. A throat to come home to, tupelo. Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable. Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear. Wistful, woke most every afternoon In the green rooms of the Abandonarium. Beautiful cage, asylum in. Reckless urges to climb celestial trellises that may or may not Have been there. So few wild raspberries, they were countable, Triaged out by hand. Ten-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Intimacy with others, Sateen. Extreme hyacinth as evidence. Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves Will (perhaps tomorrow) die. High editorial illusion of   “Control.” Early childhood: measles, Scarlet fevers; Cleopatra for most masquerades, gold sandals, broken home. Convinced Gould’s late last recording of the Goldberg Variations Was put down just for her. Unusual coalition of early deaths. Early middle deaths as well. Believed, despite all evidence, In afterlife, looked hopelessly for corroborating evidence of   such. Wisteria, extreme. There was always the murmur, you remember, about going home.

And to the curious I say, Don’t be naïve. The soul, like a trinket, is a she. I lay down in the tweed of one man that first frost night. I did not like the wool of  him. You have one mitochondrial speck of evidence on your cleat. They can take you down for that. Did I forget to mention that when you’re dead You’re dead a long time. My uncle, dying, told me this when asked, Why stay here for such suffering. A chimney swift flits through the fumatorium. I long for one last Blue democracy, Which has broke my heart a while. How many minutes have I left, the lover asked, To still be beautiful? I took his blond face in my hands and kissed him blondly On his mouth.

Where is your father whose eye you were the apple of? Where are your mother’s parlor portieres, her slip-covered days, her petticoats? In the orchard at the other end of  time, you were just a child in ballet slippers, Your first poodle skirt, your tortoiseshell barrettes. As the peach tree grew more Scarce each day, you kept running out to try to tape the leaves back on their boughs. Once, I caught you catch a pond of sunlight in your lap and when you stood, The sunlight spilt; it could never follow you. Once, above the river, You told me you were born to be a turtle, swimming down. Under the bridge Now you take your meals where the thinnest creatures live at the end Of the world.Carpe Demon, you told me just before you put down the phone And drank the antifreeze. This year, the winter sky in Missouri is a kind of cold The color of a turtle’s hood, a soup of dandelion, burdock root, and clay.