Aught, no. 11/12 (2003)
Corinne Lee
Lacuna
Believe
the wind—its ethos
is the flexing instant. A certain element
of the vague and blank. Like my passion for you,
for anyone, which at root
has a wiped slate face, featureless
but for one
keyhole
mouth (black, kiss/limitless). The specific
is a desiccant. Let's be wary
of whales, which can listen
to
a mate's song
for hours, memorize
every arabesque and shimmy,
then replicate the melody flawlessly
a year hence. Not much later,
the
repeaters are beached, reducing to bone
from exaction. They have learned
there is no fleeing
life's large, ambiguous
monster weep. So, please concede:
Your
sex is not merely you,
but also all violets, and our hands have pasts
as feet. We'll then love with enormity,
joining all deer who,
without precision or diction,
lift their heads
from clover and see
straight through you, me.
I.
School
II.
Manner
III.
Mannerism
That has been the footpath
of our love. I've always specialized
in skimming kisses
across the least suitable,
of
which you are a prime member—
all for my thrill
of Piccadilly flirt-us. Yet now there is a fontanel,
cooing and crested
with
auburn down, filling
my breasts' cleft. Day-old colostrum
like nougat
on her slightly older chin. Both pinnacle and vortex,
she
is. Will always be. Sure, I can't take a dream
family's balm-driven weather
with me. So I won't breathe
this stale air,
will
deny vipers seethe
around our frame. Sometimes we must playact
with mask grins, hide
behind rain.
Abduction
of Ambition
Why is the other half
of life's algebraic
always bovine, internetted?
Since we reside in a garden,
there is no purpose
but pollen. Admitted: the mosses
have philosophized
for millennia, but they remain
stump-stunted. Hallelujah
for our ragged vegetable plot
and your holy labor of treehouse
beneath redbud languor,
feathering mesquite. Why strive
for more than this, my love?
Let us be lengthy,
orange when ripe.
Abduction
of Unbridled Passion
On rose days, our kin
are sugarcane. Honeyed supper rites.
How deftly the familiar
can kindle, but worry this:
Have our bricklayers completed
all calculations?
Once a hearth is built,
it is never distant. Surely, elsewhere,
all is honeycombed
with entrances
to rapture. And, if able
to touch you, uncensored
by children's yelps,
my fingertips would
be rising lakes, spilling. Slaking.
Abduction
of Youth
Shush, accept my tongue. An apéritif.
An aspirin. Our robes
part to admit the dimming moon,
then wink forward
our middle-aged stomachs
of the parental. Late fall. We point
our toes into the elsewhere. Our silver,
fathomless beneath, surfaces
more easily now,
but generally hides
just as next week's thoughts
lurk within today's, and the antique way
we will someday love
skulks in us now.
Abduction
of Dry Toast
Cool cereal of domestic dawns,
tepid porridge of dusk. Eyeless
and floating, the grains butting up
against bowls, sinking
with too candied
saturation. Living in soup
and consuming it, like fish.
Do the dimensions
of her world
amaze the sea cow, or
is every estuary
just another larder? Yet offshore
from the familial,
we would be driftwood atop sea skin, bumping
each other raw, pain-noisemaking
a cappella.
is
not different from ours, but his worldview
is pregnant, steeped
in
large. We want the wee
rattling in ownership's silk purse. But I'm not your fleece.
I'm
not your flame. If there is no real Possession
or Other, then is everything
Merge?
Might as well ask,
What is the shape
of
space? The reply comes off
in our hands. The troubles are these:
All meaningful fuels are flammable.
Milked veins are scar rust.
Heroes eat hamburgers, just like us.
And
by now, we have made the full arc: electronics.
farm as factory. divestiture
of
the spirit. Global,
the slip-on-the-banana-peel club! Yet the history
of
atoms is romantic, so love
can be made on the phone. Talk quickly. Disconnect, wait eons,
then
hold me like your soul. Ah, my love, the velocity
of unknowing is slow.
before
my gaze—that of a panopticon, film producer's couch.
So vigilant in its slap-happy
adoration
of
you. Our post-prandial, post-love flamingo flush.
Quilt-coddled, we watch
a male wood thrush wheeling, not only outside
the window,
but also within our veins,
woo-warbling
songs
like wicks. Beneath his chant, your wife's station wagon
bends back, seeking. Returning.
That fine gravel pings
off the road. Fall's leaf smoke slips in,
a
blue gravy
on our tongues. Conceded: The world,
once returned to, will be spiny, a stockade. Why not, instead,
wear paint for clothes? We could love each other
in
huts of mud,
palm thatch. Yet while we fly there, over the forest,
we look down. One speckled, brown bird
who calls tut-tut-ee-ay-ee. And nothing
but fire.
Copyright © 2003, by the author.
All rights reserved.
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