|
Three Poems
Estrellita Mendez
The End Of Imagining
The Spider
hangs like a dead weight in the thin night
leaves itself open
as I'd like to be open
takes the wind
as I'd like to have it blown through me.
Let's say a cord comes from my belly button
and I am suspended from the moon and dangling.
It would be good I think, to dangle,
the word alone strings me along
popping out promises
I am almost willing to grab.
Almost willing to be caught
reaching out to them.
Let us say I am this spider
laid open and my arms
flop and the center of me
is reaching out and something catches-
in that moment that it catches-
I draw up the trap
fold myself around,
shimmy up the cord to my nest
and I feed.
Or let us be drawn, instead,
to the impossible imagining.
It is me reaching out, and up,
splayed open
and if the pin should come
to stick me through
let's say I let it
go through all the layers.
The first skin is the hardest,
the thickest, and after that
I like to think the rest is butter-soft
so I don't mind.
The impossible imagining,
where I am open and dangling
going loose in the night on my cord
in the thin blue sky
and something catches
and I stay loose,
go soft with jellyroll shivering
that spreads and I spread
and something goes through me
and I let it.
Drawn to the end of the cord
the impossible letting go.
The dead weight at the end of imagining
where there is no certainty
where there is no end to possibility
where I and something else
are run through with one another
and I dangle at the edge of impossible.
Anthem
A chill wind settles with cellophane wings
on what, in summer, I called my heart. Now
it's just one more in a long list of things
that take a beating as well. And I allow
the brown moth its place on my bedroom floor
since this is where it chose to die. I spread
a mist of poison by the front room door
but certain dead places attract the dead.
In my room of dreams the autumn miser
paints a half-tone portrait of the real world
through aged gauze: the empty lids where eyes were
and underneath the mummy wrap, my curled
lashes squeeze out a fist-sized anger, pulsing with rhythm,
like doomed soldiers beating out an anthem.
Place At The Wheel
I hadn't thought the dead man
would come into my arms
a Tuesday morning in September
ten months and three weeks after the accident
that took his life and changed mine.
He was almost a stranger to me
unknown except for a thin tie,
a connecting line on the spider's web,
that let me feel the sticky miasma
juggle gut wrench of his fall.
I was fallen already
close enough to the base of days,
the rut of walls and cages,
a quarter turn, and I'd have seen
the insides of my eyes
turned into mud buckets
and not have cared.
I'd earned my numbness the way
a child rushes again and bangs again
into battering arms
for the comfort of human contact
earns the bruised cheek
to turn next time.
A slow neglect which I nurtured
as a gardener tends a prized orchid
obstinate and difficult to grow.
It was a letting go of sorts.
A soft bed of dust
and I had been so tired,
the witch's voice
urging me to lie amidst the poppies,
sleep and forgetting.
The dead man came into my arms
to tell me what I couldn't know
when I stood in the sand
against a cut cold wind
that blistered me,
cried my useless grief
to the salt ocean at sunset,
remembered the pain of feeling again,
anything again.
So now I know how pain is a wheel
and grief is a wheel
and my place at the wheel,
center or rim,
describes the circuit of my travel.
But it's love, or the hope of love,
that keeps me stretched along the sharp edges
where I risk contact with all surfaces.
The wide and rolling thunder
of a cycle gone low and high again.
lingo 5
 Books in print by Estrellita Mendez
|
