Renée Ashley

ashley

from Basic Heart

Contents

  Biography
  The Map Is of      Another World
  Invitation
  The Things We      Said Are Much      Maligned
  What the Dark Was   Heart as Metaphor
  Self-Portrait on a      White Table
  She Refuses to      Believe in      Dreams
  Lines for the      Disengaged      Heart
  What Will Not Help      You
  The Roof Is Askew,      The Sky Falls In
  Death Is a Hat
  Capsule
  Desire Is Naked
  White (I)
  White (II)
  How Little We Can       Only Be
  A Poem about Not      Quite Getting It      (But Not an      Aphasic Poem      in the Least)
  A Nice Poem in
     Praise of Sex
     To Make Up for      the One That      Wasn't So Nice
  Heart Beneath a      Door
  Charity
  Poem about the      Cages With a      Sentence from      Wallace Stevens
  I Am Still Here

 

A Web Chapbook from
The Literary Review


 Renée Ashley

from Basic Heart


THE MAP IS OF ANOTHER WORLD

I

This legend is uneasy, unreliable, wrong --
And restless. I am of two hearts and between
One word and the body's little failures.
The sky is adding numbers in its sleep:
One plus one plus one… O, still is one.


II

And the sun with its serious red – every dark
Is not a shadow the dead cavort in. And yes
The living stumble but stumbling is the least
Of what could come. I have told you of
Some of this. Something salty in the telling.


III

How we are alone. How we know this.
All the time in a world barely formed.
The dark curtain open and in my sleep
one long dead comes still wanting.
O poem, I have never seen a mirror like you.



First published in Kenyon Review