*
Together we circled
the rings, a boy, he was still learning
& we moved slowly,
picking up rhythm as we traveled,
we would see it all, digging our blades
to find traction, balance, to free the mind
of doubt, falling,
occasionally bumping up
against the outer edge—
it would take years if we were lucky—
stumbling in the face of reason,
O muses, O geniuses of art,
O memory, our blades crushing
the ice.
*
I knew by then
that anything was possible —
once we witnessed a child’s cheek nearly cut out
from another skater’s blade during a fall—
as he swerved in & out of the skaters,
the triple axel of envy, gluttony, & pride
igniting their hearts, always someone
who wanted to outdo another,
we had to witness all of it,
because it had already happened,
I had to be vigilant, cautious. Sometimes
I held his hand tight.
Because I knew.
*
We kept our heads down.
We were entranced. Focused.
Sometimes we could not see
anything before us. That’s what it
required. One year I had forgotten
the first leaves of spring. I had forgotten
all the years of toil. I looked up &
trees had flowered. All it took
was waiting out the bleak winter.
The hemisphere of darkness. The color
was lime green. I wanted to tell her—
This is what it’s like.
*
Like just awaking
drenched, they persist.
ghosts in our poems,
ghosts in our imagination,
ghosts in our waking hours, ghosts
who elude philosophers, poets,
scientists, psychiatrists,
therapists & doctors, ghosts
who perpetuate,
who guileless,
will not keep quiet,
who preside over the populous,
& unknowingly rob
the living, ghosts
who made their own house
be their gallows, Dante says,
will never rest.
*
Under microscope, magnifying glass,
using magnets & electricity, pin & tuning fork,
lumbar punctured, photographed, sketched,
hypnotized, documented, compared, analyzed,
tortured, starved, etherized, objectified
& concretized, held prisoner
by the perpetrators of a science—
by the history of an era, by the myth
of the unsolvable math of the mercurial mind.
*
Daffodils, survivors, of the cruelest month
tossing their heads in sprightly dance from the ground arise—
beautiful long spines & yellow crowns—
Tulips, Plath’s flower (Hughes fancied a fox),
too excitable . . . too red. What we thought would thrive
we found a family of fragile
evergreens we had planted one year—bottom needles eaten out
by starving deer, one we had to tie to a stake—
to keep steady & alive.
*
like the snap of a branch,
like the terror of the wind,
like roots dug up,
like worms in their undergrowth,
like the rat on the pavement
smashed by the wheels of a car
into an inconceivable pancake
like the inexplicable act
of making a noose
hanging it from the ceiling
& tightening it around the neck,
like the argument in a forest,
like a person who knows things,
a person who can’t forget
a person who probes,
persists & is unkind,
like the mind hating itself,
like the wind giving in to logic,
like thought murdering the body,
like the night when the resilience
of lavender, woody, spiky,
tucked in the corner
where deck meets earth,
gave up & failed to thrive.
*
Because it was Christmas & I was home
with my fiancé, because her blue eyes
burned with the brightness of knowing & barely
a fleck of gloom, because she was young
& brave & still wore cheap & sexy dresses
in which only she made elegant & though
she sometimes came home intoxicated,
& vomited from drink & wept alone
suffering from the human syndrome of need,
want & abandon, she still slept wearing
a Bugs Bunny sweatshirt, made us all scrambled
eggs, nursed her beloved cat, gossiped with girl-
friends on her phone & slept stone-cold
into the morning like Sleeping Beauty
awaiting a kiss, in a room under a vaulted
ceiling of a synagogue of the holy
& depraved, where I too once slept
in the cradle of despair & rage.
*
Because gods are threatening to tear down branches,
uproot trees, because there is no réprimande, recourse,
no release, rain unleashes in downpours, wind casting
for answers, for crimes committed, souls humiliated, denied
passage, denied rest, there is no end to the flooding, no end
of grief. In downpours, rain is unleashed.
*
Metamorphized into trees
that for eternity bleed
if cut or pruned or preyed
upon, forever cast into hell’s
seventh circle the lip above
the chasm of pain which holds the din
of infinite grief, unable to settle
neither in heaven, nor the underworld
the self-slaughtered.
Hinduism considered it ‘soul murder’,
Muslims, hellfire & in the eternal life
forever to inflict themselves with pain,
Aristotle considered self-murder
a crime against one’s self & country, Jews denied
a proper burial. And for your lifeblood
I will require a reckoning.
There is no logic to divine,
no pleasure or pain greater
than human stain.
*
A drawer of junk jewelry, combs & brushes,
Sweatshirts, maid-of-honor dress wrapped in cello-
phane & stored like shadows in the closet’s
hinterland, diary with crushed pressed
flowers, drawn red hearts, confessions, hopes, dreams,
ink bleeding on onion skin thin as leaves, novels
with pages flagged, postcard of Mexico
I once sent, lock of hair sealed under glass,
Of the rashness, impassioned,
forsaken, forever bemused—
a life mask made of strips
of paper-mache as if to mock
the dead’s eternal masquerade.
Photograph © kygp
‘Thrive: A Lyric Sequence’ is from Asylum: A Personal, Historical, Natural Inquiry in 103 Lyric Sections by Jill Bialosky.
