Poetry: Jodie Garay

Poetry

Jodie Garay

NOT TO WRITE

 That was then, which is not now.
                The story begins or ends.
 For that matter, she said, personality comes from the brain,
 right?  Not enough oxygen there.  The story comes to a halt.
 What's it made of?  Not now.  It's actually made
 of articles, ornate, carved, reflected in a long
 pier mirror.  Furniture the backdrop.  What I was looking for:
 a way in, named and renamed.  The same place.  Water
 running, the sound of pipes behind walls.  I'm there, or was, then.
 Not to say now, where the story edges up, pulls back.  Salt
 on a slug.  The mirror shows a wall
 some windows.  What about the untoward remarks?
 There's a donkey walking down a street, any street, when
 it bumps into the sun.   The air is thin, particulate.
 But that's at the middle.  Where
 do I go from here?




 BRIDGE

 Arms thrown to span
 (motion of control)

 unmapped territory from one embrace
 to another

 This is not anonymous, this could not be
 more personal

 a wanting that holds
 (nothing definitive
 about seed and seedling)

 yet what settles,
 a pattern, a way of life

 (mythical bodies burnished and wrought
 along the way)

 when we become
 without notice or warning

 those lovers
 cloaked, ambivalent, too worn

 to remember the original shape

 One conversation to another,
 fingers neatly clasped

 What do you think of when you think
 of me

 wide open mouth

 big question

 lips swollen
 with words

 and the thing forgotten
 pulled tightly inward,

 an impression of distance (wild)

 begonia, rose and eucalyptus
 (floral as imagined),

 sparks with suddenness
 a hand up, a hand inside

 temptation to crush
 against         to ignite

 this tyrant

 remains on the back of my tongue,
 says:  Love is
 not precisely

 an endless              during which
 (my heart beats faster)




 FILLED WITH

 the man's voice against concrete cold winded, winding about
 wires crossed and those untouched.  There are wounds, he says.
 Trains run, footsteps as background.  Not thinking
 of the child.  Her pretty hair, pulling at her ears,
 the pain there.  Internal and an effort to block the words.
 (Not thinking of me, I think.)  Empty hands,
 bright office light late at night.  The man enters, pushes
 at a door that doesn't give easily.  It's a hard sell.
 The wounds, he points.  The child now curled up
 beneath covers.  A draft comes with the man.  That sound
 of cold, electric shock in the cold,
 I sit through.  A moment of
 dream of calm.




 SPARRING

         1

 The truth is the loss is
 contained.  Variable, at times
 contestable.  Not always
 a good fit.

         2

 Tongue wavers.  Retreats.  Tongue
 ready, but reticent.  Ready against
 the roof of my mouth

 Words like need, deeper, more

         3

 The truth is the truth is often a run on
 as in: I love all that you do to me endlessly no end

         4

 But I have discovered it too in the flesh

         5

 Return: all belongings left accidentally or otherwise.
 In a box; a small package; by boat or book rate
 or slower means.

         6

 The truth is a sudden realization
 that shoes do not necessarily run true to size.

        7

 I read in a book: The risks are the same.  The truth is,
 when you have a tremendous passion, it stops.




 VIEW

 She's a hawk that one, sees things that aren't there.
 Sees things that are.  Feathers up, back up.
 Somewhere between perception
 and ephemera.  Where they criss-cross,
 there's neither loss nor fixed image.
 Yes and no.  Or knowing better,
 there's freedom in confusion.
 Yet she's balanced there,
 perched.  She takes in details:
 the weave of a lapel.  Exact wave of hair
 around the ear.

 She-hawk squawks.  Softly then angrily.
 What sort of self goes fishing
 without the right equipment?

 Carnivore?  Fish-eater?  Worm-eater?
 I know nothing about the diet of hawks,
 but their cool obsessiveness, I see soaring over
 pristine mountain lakes, and then
 routine.

 She-hawk swoops low, an arc, low screech.  I am then,
 in a single place, starting point:
 nest of thread, muscle, flecked steel.




 NO TERRITORY IS NEUTRAL

 In another verse, I thought of sparrows, but wrote
 swallows.  Deep in the throat where tiny bones catch.  Or high
 in the lower left quadrant of sky.  What blue was it?

 A cleaving.  I realize my heroes
 are singular.  Cerulean by chance?

 Certain fingers memorized like the lines of a face
 in total darkness.  Nothing personal, nothing
 that couldn't be scrawled on a postcard.  Messages careful-
 ly stenciled on verso.  Where language lets go.  I remember
 certain fingers down to the cuticle.

 Neither the last moment nor the first, neither less nor more.
 Spindle webs of tree tide up to window
 washing the upper portion with sky (today deep blue).
 Light muddled, or not at all.
 This territory is the whole world, the creak
 the creak in a traveler's steps.  Sky contained
 in the lost sentence, the last left to go.
 Had they rummaged? someone asks.
 Surely,  I reply, surely.

 Now I know, though, no need to accede,
 to acknowledge.  No need to run rampant
         back and back around
 or to hold a word fluttering up.
 No need
 to grasp the incontrovertible

 or what fits in small boxes
 on a shelf, a pier; on the present wind of things
 caught by their own shadow or the shadow,
 a catapult toward abundance.