Monica Ferrell

I rise like a red balloon, untethered and vacant. The essence of my dolor has become rarefied, Holy; like a fragrance, bodiless, without referent. It is pale shadow on the sun, a wasp’s-wing, accidental Splash of poison on the white rose’s thorn— I twist it in my fingers and faint.Shall I tell you? There was one bad fairy at my birth, there came one curse, One blister, one drop of mercury in the moult of me And everything was ruined after. Still it is No good; the words drift from me like ashes. I am so old now, I have left half my life In caves hollowed out in rock by the seashore: I prayed in each one, and could not find my way back, Or lied when the pass-word was asked, or turned my back, Making gestures of despondency at the roiling surf. In a mirror I shot all my hateful selves, the yesterdays.

Sorrento, at night the long fingers of your orange lights Prick me in the sizzling streets, where the pinnacles Of other people ring tinny and papier-mâché. Is this the way Up to the murderous cliff? It’s most important that I get there And leave no witness. Ah, is this the majolica medallion Which marks the grave of girl abducted by a stallion Whom she gave a lump of maple sugar? For that was in an autumn, The time of year when young girls get hopeless and feel like Giving it all away, the way a matronly merchant Might brush off her lap, at the iron end of the market day: It’s over, it’s worthless, without deserving and without Purpose have I nourished this hope in my small patch of earth, A sickly weed whose nodding sun’s gone nova.

After our rendez-vous—this the last word he said, Waving to me as the train pulled away from the station. And so it seemed: harmless. Till evening brought The first prick of fever, which soon trellised my veins; At 2 AM came that knock on the city gates, Little pig, little pig, let me come in. . . . Ha! ever a bold and warlike people, we didn’t. Days of siege. We threw corpses dead of plague From the tops of parapets to frighten it away: But what was it? That vatic voice was not like his at all, and by its speech one could tell it somehow knew us well. The mystery deepened. A strange billowing cloud Made my people short of breath, I heard them wheezing. The end seemed near. What could this ailment be? Hunting  out clues, I went over the roses and snows Of his departed face like a treasure map, over His words hanging in air like the scrolls of Alexandria. Had I not been consensual, a free agent, Gay, single as any singing lark, who Chooses to unlock, to whom? Well? One night, finally, I climbed our tallest tower, lay In the open on its roof and had a brilliant dream. I saw my body nestled between angels Like the body of the prophet Jesus, I saw it Leaking from a finger’s tip like a slit ragdoll. And then I saw: this feathery, amorphous creature Black as mildew in the bath, soft as bread mold, Chewing on my bloodpuddings in the corner. And then I knew! That morning, I went out by the porter’s door Pressing one finger to judicious lips like Oedipus. Your name, I said,I have it now: Despair— Shrieking, it vanished with brimstone and flames. So I etched Harmless in that ground of merds and moss And to this day, my people listen to strangers crying wares With an intelligent ear, remembering our grave old danger.

I woke. A tiny knot of skin on a silver table Set in the birth-theater, blinking in the glare Of electric lights and a strange arranged Passel of faces: huge as gods in their council. I was the actor who forgets his lines and enters On stage suddenly wanting to say,I am. I was almost all eye: they weighed me down, Two lump-big brown-sugar bags in a face Which did not yet know struggle, burden; How the look of newborns unnerves. Then They wrapped me in pale yellow like a new sun Still too small to throw up into the sky. It was midnight when they injected me With a plague; tamed, faded as imperialism, pox Had once put its palm-leaf hand over a quarter of Earth Saying,these. Now it was contracted to a drop: And in the morning I knew both death and life. Lapped in my nimbus of old gold light, my Huge lashes drooped over my deepened eyes, like Ostrich-feather shades over twin crown princes: wet heads Sleek and doomed as the black soul of an open poppy.

When I take my scissors to your shirts, I am frightened: not that they will whimper But that they won’t understand the violence I mean. That kind of violence is the other side of love, Bright as a light-saber and permanent As the angel’s swords above Eden Barring that couple with a final X, That violence means a love strong as death. Once Sie ist mein leben, you said, meaning me And I took those words personally And knocked upon the door of my heart Until all its birds flooded to you, in a rush— Like the Iroquois, I tugged on our peace-pipe, I wrote your name in smoke. Then went home With my pockets rolling in shining glass beads, My pockets so rich with the coin of your country.