Rebecca Lindenberg

The capital city. Arrowroot. Water-bur. Colts. Hail. Bamboo grass. The round-leaved violet. Club moss. Water oats. Flat river-boats. The mandarin duck. —The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon The sky. And the sky above that. The exchange of ice between mouths. Other people's poems My friend says we never write about anything we can get to the bottom of. For him, this is a place arbored with locust trees. For me, it's a language for which I haven't quite found the language yet. The dewy smell of a new-cut pear. Bacon chowder flecked with thyme. Roasted duck skin ashine with plum jam. Scorpion peppers. Clothes on a line. A smell of rain battering the rosemary bush. The Book Cliffs. Most forms of banditry. Weathered barns.Dr. Peebles.The Woman's Tonic, it says on the side, in old white paint. The clink of someone putting away dishes in another room. The mechanical bull at the cowboy bar in West Salt Lake. The girls ride it wearing just bikinis and cowboy hats. I lean over to my friend and say,I would worry about catching something. And he leans back to say,That's really the thing you'd worry about? We knock the bottom of our bottles together. How they talk in old movies, like,Now listen here. Just because you can swing a bat doesn't mean you can play ball. Or, I 'll be your hot cross if you'll be my bun. Well, anyway, you know what I mean. Somewhere between the sayable and the unsayable, poetry runs. Antidote to the river of forgetting. Like a rosary hung from a certain rearview mirror. Like the infinite rasp of gravel under the wheel of a departing car. Gerard Manley Hopkins's last words were I'm so happy, I'm so happy. Oscar Wilde took one look at the crackling wallpaper in his Paris flat, then at his friends gathered around and said,One or the other of us has got to go. Wittgenstein said simply,Tell all my friends, I've had a wonderful life.

not to be in love with you I can’t remember what it was like it must’ve been lousy James Schuyler You take off your black motorcycle jacket, hang it on the back of a chair. It’s cold from our walk along the sea wall. Your pockets jingle with shells. While we were gone, you left the stove on low—some things you do make me so nervous. You graze the surface of sauce simmering in a pan, shiny fingertip held out for me to lick, you say “What does it need?” Maybe nothing, maybe honey to unbitter the lime. Later that night you’ll bury your face in my belly and sob. “I’m sorry,” though I don’t think you are always talking to me, my love. But now lobster steam billows up the window, you gulp purple wine, your pinky sticking out, and the round olives are the green all green things aspire to be.

O you gods, you long-limbed animals, you astride the sea and you unhammocked in the cyprus grove and you with your hair full of horses, please. My thoughts have turned from the savor of plums to the merits of pity—touch and interrupt me, chasten me with waking, humble me for wonder again. Seed god and husk god, god of the open palm, you know me, you know my mettle. See, my wrists are small. O you, with glass-colored wind at your call and you, whose voice is soft as a turned page, whose voice unrolls paper, whose voice returns air to its forms, send me a word for faith that also means his thrum,his coax and surge and her soft hollow, please—friend gods, lend me a word that means what I would ask him for so when he says: You give it all away, I can say: I am not sorry. I sing.

I haven't written        in a while because I don't want to talk about anything I've been unable to stop thinking about: the knotted thread of bad capillaries on my retinae, money, or that my morning was ruined by the unusual tightness of jeans around my thighs, like the obligations of having a body so ill-fitting, oppressively snug around an obstinate will. And while       I don't want to be distracted from this Duchamp thing I've been working on—     I am itched out of reverie over and over again by this feeling I don't deserve my raptures anymore. So I'm sorry. I don't want to bring you down. It's unfair to have to hear about needles and envelopes and flies when you might just have been enjoying an iced tea outside and when I would prefer to tell you, really, there's a family of pheasant living in the massive cottonwood we call the Tree of Life. The male's red, green, gold plumage makes him look like a Christmas present I would want to give you. So except “I hope you're well,” that's all.

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee; What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage. Ezra Pound You’ll find labels describing what is gone: an empress’s bones, a stolen painting of a man in a feathered helmet holding a flag-draped spear. A vellum gospel, hidden somewhere long ago forgotten, would have sat on that pedestal; this glass cabinet could have kept the first salts carried back from the Levant. To help us comprehend the magnitude of absence, huge rooms lie empty of their wonders—the Colossus, Babylon’s Hanging Gardens and in this gallery, empty shelves enough to hold all the scrolls of Alexandria. My love, I’ve petitioned the curator who has acquired an empty chest representing all the poems you will now never write. It will be kept with others in the poet’s gallery. Next door, a vacant room echoes with the spill of jewels buried by a pirate who died before disclosing their whereabouts. I hope you don’t mind, but I have kept a few of your pieces for my private collection. I think you know the ones I mean.

I think she wanted to explain the silence hidden within her voice— blue egg in the nettles. She wrote something on a rock, used the rock to bash in the skull of an injured deer. Bloodied swan-neck arms. She slinks into her own viscera, a baby fox backing into its trunkhole. The wordbone's connected to the gutbone. Meanwhile, her desire for nobody now bucks like a rabbit under her ground.

A leaf the green that a child would choose if asked to draw a leaf. * This heavy-petalled rose is humid as the accent of my current correspondent. * Trees unberried by bird. Trees unleafed by beetle. * My correspondent is a tentative man and I am unaccustomed to tentative men. * White rose blossom browning at the edges. Paperback book. * Inside, my mother humming a song I’ve never heard. * Kinds of holiness. * Trees unbarked by winter deer. * My correspondent will not let me love him. * Green things make such mild noise. * I uncross my legs to find, with a bare foot, that sun has warmed the stone. I partake of the sun. * And the stone.

You give me flowers resembling Chinese lanterns. You give me hale, for yellow. You give me vex. You give me lemons softened in brine and you give me cuttlefish ink. You give me all 463 stairs of Brunelleschi’s dome. You give me seduction and you let me give it back to you. You give me you. You give me an apartment full of morning smells—toasted bagel and black coffee and the freckled lilies in the vase on the windowsill. You give me 24-across. You give me flowers resembling moths’ wings. You give me the first bird of morning alighting on a wire. You give me the sidewalk café with plastic furniture and the boys with their feet on the chairs. You give me the swoop of homemade kites in the park on Sunday. You give me afternoon-colored beer with lemons in it. You give me D.H. Lawrence, and he gives me pomegranates and sorb-apples. You give me the loose tooth of California, the broken jaw of New York City. You give me the blue sky of Wyoming, and the blue wind through it. You give me an ancient city where the language is a secret everyone is keeping. You give me a t-shirt that says all you gave me was this t-shirt. You give me pictures with yourself cut out. You give me lime blossoms, but not for what they symbolize. You give me yes. You give me no. You give me midnight apples in a car with the windows down. You give me the flashbulbs of an electrical storm. You give me thunder and the suddenly green underbellies of clouds. You give me the careening of trains. You give me the scent of bruised mint. You give me the smell of black hair, of blond hair. You give me Apollo and Daphne, Pan and Syrinx. You give me Echo. You give me hyacinths and narcissus. You give me foxgloves and soft fists of peony. You give me the filthy carpet of an East Village apartment. You give me seeming not to notice. You give me an unfinished argument, begun on the Manhattan-bound F train. You give me paintings of women with their eyes closed. You give me grief, and how to grieve.

The mask that burns like a violin, the mask that sings only dead languages, that loves the destruction of being put on. The mask that sighs like a woman even though a woman wears it. The mask beaded with freshwater pearls, with seeds. The plumed mask, the mask with a sutured mouth, a moonface, with a healed gash that means harvest. A glower that hides wanting. A grotesque pucker. Here’s a beaked mask, a braided mask, here’s a mask without eyes, a mask that looks like a mask but isn’t—please don’t try to unribbon it. The mask that snows coins, the mask full of wasps. Lace mask to net escaping thoughts. Pass me the rouged mask, the one made of sheet music. Or the jackal mask, the hide-bound mask that renders lovers identical with night.