Poetry from The Literary Review
Renée Ashley
Whose Bright Examining
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You go anyway so. What do they call you? chucklehead? dickbender? bowl of fish? skeet? (At this rate the woman will never ah! she’s forgotten the beginning the end.) They drew a chalk shadow in the shape of the female not the dog. Head hanging like a flag. (You have to say what you think no you don’t you never have to say that out loud.) Not one shifts an impulse onto the bright with her in mind. (One makes a soft, simple sound in the creak of the attic roof. In the sink spilling over.) Such mewing and crying! Love makes you stupid you still don’t get it you are not the world you’re barely there. So. The light on those gravestones still takes the shape of gravestones and the dog whispers (the dog never) bone of the center. Bone of the grass. God! (How can you not understand? You carry the living. The heart laboring hard in its cell. Mother of all things unfruitful. Victim of everything.)
You have forgotten the words you need to say that. (You’ve misplaced articles : things are dangling, things are running on, your restrictive clause is on the rails in a universe parallel & sadly contracted.) Your madmen are useless. (You liked me best when I could not speak.) Your friends say they’re deaf—and the ringing in your ears is real. You’ve bum rushed every one who’s tried to love you (they tend to leave in the most abrupt ways). You’re alone be- cause you scoured your house with sorrow. Your daily word is cry (words have never had meaning until now). Write your rebuke in the white space around you, in what could be called sleep or that-which-is-like, the saying of what might really matter, of what, so surely, you never will utter at all.
A backward breath into lung and recall—I know what damage is. I know the gun, trigger of the heart. Respire. Expire. Aback or away. The day has been all eyes and all those open. You are in me like too many mouths.
The dogs sing beautifully over everything beautiful or not—white sleet or white sun—and you have never yet begun with nothing. Tell your friends to wait. This will take some time. Imagine a burned house—steamy sill, dampened ash. Shingle, lintel, coal. An emptiness spread like soot. Can you even begin to comprehend nothing? Posit a negative in a positive mind, the idea of no idea expanding? The dark smell of gone, of you can’t get this back. Consider the stark break between yes and so often—between no and not yet, some time. Think hypothetical, absolute. Oh druggery! Oh get me through this. Every day. Dog song and dander jig your approach—such joy! Privilege and you so heart-poor. A poverty of fire. You yourself consumed. But not so simple. Never as clear as that. Nothing so sweetly entire. |
