THAT HER ACTS OF BEAUTY BE REMEMBERED
The pale maple carrel
in the library's periodical stacks
gives itself easy
to the notched glyph,
and the tinny plaint
of a student's cranked-up
headphones honeycombs
the silence. I've got
to handle you, my memory
genius, with oven mitts
as it requires zero
effort to mar a thing—
we're the unprepared
young burdened with records
I think, dice Pound. It
coheres all right. Emma, be
co-here with me. Thready
thin tube sock of fall
light through library glass, quite
enough to see by. You
I have had sometimes, body
et al. and I want
more records yet, I want the wildly
readable annals of that.
__
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Just some pillow talk of Dickens' Pip. Then the sublet where we slept
the afternoon through
did a righteous thing: it stopped
"its hackneyed corporeal paraphrase." Stopped its walled-in reek of fresh
paint and missed
garbage day. The ceiling's
panting fan, the sun slatted on the bare wall, and our bed threading
some concealed and
narrow strait—for a moment
these ceased assuring us of their capacity to steward experience. Like
an ice-cube dunked
into cool onion soup. What
Donne would've called an "Extasie." And why, wherefrom? Perhaps
my wondering aloud
at what rate of interest
Pip would've paid of his college loans, or how lying under a coverlet
all day is the best
new battle strategy
for the impending class war, managed to somehow trip a wire to the
infinite. Cause aside,
this deific whittling down
dissipated before we knew it. Like a lover's slap, the finite came back
online: public radio
prattling on about the Upper
Midwestern employees striking furiously. The humidifier steaming
hard, so clearly
the oracular crack in our atemporal
temple floor over which no all-knowing sybil stewed. Then a man out
the window, beyond
the sill's seven potted cacti,
who'd been trying to tuck for ten minutes his grass-green Volvo into a
tight curb spot,
gave up and rounded the block.
__
CONSOLATION PRIZE
...so I did sit and eat, Herbert concluded and so
do I, between waffle bites reading
about tulip mania, that Dutch bulb bubble in 1637
when speculative futures jacked a flower's price
to 10,000 guilders, 50 years of food and clothes
for a family of four. But I close the book
because what I keep coming to—can't help it—is Plath
harassed by her tulips too excitable,
their woundy red poxing the white of her
hospital room where she lay convalescing
post-appendectomy, 1961. A purchase of Ted's, no doubt,
like the Amsterdam man, big-time merchant,
who liquidates his fleet for one bouquet and sniveling
his lover's apology proffers it
to the wife he wronged, who promptly sneezes.
Maybe it's too easy, but it's occurred to me before
that gifts and giving might be one way
to meaningfully oppose the tyranny
of late capital: the time you received on your birthday
flowers from an ex—with my pocketknife,
we removed as by ritual their blooms and plugged them
between our toes, to beautify the steps we took,
room to room, our house, this life.
__
Straight up love poems, with apologies to Pound, Dickens, Donne, Herbert, and Plath.
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