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


SELF-PORTRAIT ON A WHITE TABLE

No one is looking. Lay the heart down
  there. Is it trembling? I thought
it might be weary, be sorry, be somehow
  canted at a dangerous angle. All night
it kept me thinking: here is the valve
  that stokes the soul, here is the soul's
bright bucket.
                  All the night
is pounding. Nothing falls from the steep
  sky, the moon's thin light's gone out.
The great, dark swath of the world beckons
  and the heart clicks like an insect
taking what it can from the clamorous night.



First published in The Drunken Boat