Inventing a People Who Are Lacking
Also by Melissa Kwasny
Reading Novalis in Montana Thistle The Archival Birds
I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights, coeditor Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry, 1800–1950, editor
for Bryher
I.
In recapturing the intentions on which the constitution of this universe depends, in which the Earth is represented, meditated, and encountered in the person of its Angel, we discover that it is much less a matter of answering questions concerning essences (“what is it?”) than questions concerning persons (“who is it?” or “to whom does it correspond?”) for example, who is the earth? who are the waters, the plants, the mountains? or, to whom do they correspond.
—Henry Corbin
The Language of Flowers
I wish you were here on my arm. I wish I could crawl between your sheets. My Poppy. My Tulip Tree. My Sweet Basil. You are what I used to dream of as a child, what my mother did, not so much a dress as its fabric, pink dotted swiss, a white voile shirt with French cuffs. Tell me your name, what you seek, and to what you aspire. I will mount a campaign for your world. Magnolia, cloudy and thick, each petal the exact temperature of a hand. It is Saturday morning, we are living near lakes, luxuriant, privileged creatures that we are. Our authors say cypress is the favored tree of the earth. Say that flowers are the liturgy of the angels. Wings peeled back so they lift on the breeze. Centered, the golden ovaries bees feast on. Drunk as a young girl on the words of Dylan Thomas, I stagger in the streets of my small town, moonwalking the river, saying sun of our balled fruit, raw honey. I stick my fingers into the champagne flute of a lily. Everything bridal white becomes stained. I can’t help but be selfish being faithful to myself. Dabbing it behind the knees. Yes, frosting.
Leaf
Oak stem, rational, its routes laid out like Roman water lines, insect eggs in the pocket of each intersection. Enter the tapestry room where a fire is glowing. Who taught you how green proceeds out of the red? Your life is so different now, healed in a way. Is this the shape of your healing: out from a center stalk, ginkgo’s narrow pleats, pressed seams of oak, embossed of maple? They are stretched to their limits. All skin. Yet they breathe the same air you breathe, breath of the wealthy, which is cleaner than most, breath of the poor whom they occupy. Read the palms of the earth in child’s pose. You think all you need is to be thin, to be this close to your purpose. Torn with loss. Limp without root. How can you disavow anything’s inner life? If all you think about is when you will sleep, what you will read, no wonder the wind lifts without a word. Everything betrays you with its promise. So what is the answer? Oak leaf splayed like the wake of a ship. Your route: straight through the middle.
Sacraments
The green of grass seems personal, ours, because it was there when we were safe, young in our boredom. Cypress, pink scent of flour and water. Water, easy, prolonged. If Walt Whitman were the pilot, I wouldn’t be afraid to fly. There would always be swallows and a motor. The vanishing, not the vanished pastoral. Though there is still time to sit at the boathouse. Pond sheen. Fish coin the surface. We don’t think of slaves. We don’t torture. What we have against the sacramental is that we will avoid it at all cost. Baptism: goose wings beat the surface. What are holy orders without something to obey? Bread of our clay, dropping to our leaves, all the deciduousness we can muster. Light a metropolis over the cleft. Weather is open here, closed like our days. The migrating birds try to stay above us. Confirmation: we are here, though we confess the hours when no one knew where we were. How they followed us into adulthood. Penance we might save for last.
Attar
Night blooming. Suckle of honey. What the mockingbird wears to keep his balance. Hair-thin like the girls here who skip dessert but allow themselves real cream for their coffee. The man who combs his beard while praying, the Sufis say, is not admitted to heaven, though he repents by tearing it out. Silly man, see how he is still obsessed with it. This evening, after dinner, I go walking, the perfume Irene has given me sprayed on my wrists. I start with the trees, more simply with the leaves. I walk my way in, scenting the grasses. Where the country begins: fox left like a dirty rag on the road, folk who handle snakes to heal themselves. Better than drugs and cheaper, Irene said. Everyone has a need for transcendence. William Carlos Williams knew nothing of what it is takes for a woman to stand naked in her own house. Cancer in her bones, dancing to Roy Orbison. No, I won’t ever be cured, Irene told the thin girls. It’s in the nature of the disease.
Sweetbriar
Today, my cusp. I have hit full bloom. Already you can feel me close, on my way back to you. You cannot see what rose is at my lips or where its tender arbors in my hair, white, soft as banana. Today, I am glutted with gloss. Today, anything I don’t like I call postmodern. Go inside a stone, that would be your way. I am wandering the woodlots of childhood. No one knew then what to call the hatched vines snaking up these trunks like a hair shirt. But the pauses I remember, when the country lane gladdened the shed summer light or when the brown water disappeared under oak. Oak large as mountains. It is a wonder any one of us survived. I hid in the lilacs, their voluptuous violet shade, the cool dirt underneath I would dig my hands in. My people, or “kind grandparents of the corn and sun” have all but disappeared from the fields. We had a pact, much like the one I think I’ve made with you. Hey, daydream, though the boys were harsh and cornered us. Though our mothers didn’t protect the girls. We love those girls, would fill our lives with them.