.mp3, 1.76 mg.poems by Cynthia Davidson
Final Print
1.
You hate photographs. Yet
within any frame you somehow
form an outline within
the perimeter of your absence:
pre-color history waiting
to be filled with the trivia
of shooting stars or idle chat
that ricochet like pinballs.
In each uncropped proof
I sense you bleeding off the edge
with perhaps a dog companion
or a cockatoo perched on your head.
None of you are quite human.
From certain angles, you seem
eternally patient, trying and discarding
all the necessary sepia of evening,
hoping to one day find
a tone that will render
you invisible to all
but dogs, cockatoos, musicians, able cooks,
and the inevitably obstinate of heart.
2.
Isn’t this the message you feared?
Don’t worry, it’s probably good news
in an alien tongue. In
your own language, soft eyes
deliver the messages of death
and corn can’t grow, doorknobs
fly off, microwaves explode
throughout the night. By my words
I delivered these things to myself.
Gemini imploded the night
I was born, manifesting itself
in a mass and a time. Mercury
lay fused to my heart, curled and cursing
in the place from which he was destined
to flee. Quicksilver stymied,
he twisted poison in each of my dreams,
soaking them in a silver sludge
till the third figure could not be seen
in any final print. When he finally
emerged, he was crippled, false Vulcan,
of no use as a messenger.
3.
“With wings,” said my friend,
“I have no need of these,” and
cast off legs, revealing
a comet of flame that jettisoned
him from my sky. Growth occurs
knowing what must be cropped
or hidden from light. A child
knows only light teaches continuity,
that objects flicker in darkness
as if the film in her heart might break.
She holds that rosary tight in her dark fist.
But time teaches other lessons:
how another can enter and leave
these frames during dark hours
like a deer at the edge of a clearing.
How, in gentle and gradual doses,
color lays on its healing hands.
hear it read
.mp3, 1.76 mg.
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Learning to Read the Family
Her great dumbness, your first friend,
warm as the river god of sleep,
ungathered, unsolicited,
curled your rosebud O:
any body, all flesh, generic queen
of moments satisfied. How she
drew you into the working life,
slyly as a slotted spoon!
How you labored, my baby,
to crack that code! Her face,
a cryptic, ancient art,
shimmered on your unsteady iris
like a dragonfly dances on cream,
churning, turning
till butter is made, pat-a-cake
all sweet and salty in your mouth.
The third was not his face, but
her spoken word, rumbling deep
inside you till you matched it
to a mobile primum that danced
above you, like a dragonfly
dances on cream, churning,
turning. Some years later
you sat on a bed like a squaw,
watching your mother match socks:
dark to dark, light to light,
seam against obdurate seam.
After she left, you undid
each set. You laid them
before you with unthinking,
furtive joy.
(reprinted from Ariel 9 (1990))
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Union
I was thinking of getting a T-shirt
that says, “Fuck the flow.”
But how lonely life gets
here on the particle,
where excuses dry out
forming little crystal tails
that grow back never
in quite the same shape.
One finds oneself
leaning into union
of experience and thought.
The first time is the hardest;
you can’t voluntarily give up
language, in my opinion, not even
invention, the language
of necessity, or choose to see
the mirror that surrounds you, trying
every moment of your life
to start a fire, inside or out.
Only one letter separates
tinder from tender. Just be sure
before the catch you’ll
see the flash, then wander
thoughtless into sleep.
You’ll say lose pity,
there is no easy death.
Nor man in the moon.
A cauldron full of cactus flowers.
***
(previously published in ACM)