Incantations to Shells
Incantations to Air
Incantations to Bodies
Dogtown Sonnet
Incantations to My Brain
Incantations to Sadness
Lion’s paw, kitten’s paw, spiny jewel box,
I put them on the desk
and one calls out: I was made of sand and wind.
I was made of water.
The churning world that wrote my name has made
thought into laughter,
light into hands, evening into a beloved daughter.
I can’t believe a shell
can speak. I ask another which points at me
like an elegant fingernail:
Your beautiful remainder has yet to be.
You’ll only know as you’re undone
periwinkle, pear fig, alphabet cone.
Pen shell, slipper, incongruous ark,
they rise to my barefoot walk
and they call out: We have witnessed frigate birds
ride into clouds and not
return to wear the fashion of our shores—
whose changelessness
is Ararat wherever anyone lands.
The frigate bird must land,
I think. I ask another, which appears
like some golden skull:
Beginning and renewing sustains the flesh
but error binds forever
angel’s wings, heart cockle, sunrise tellin.
Move for no reason. Push, but do not crush.
Your way is gorgeous,
seasonal, ripening, fermenting, lush.
While we crawl,
you fly, rush, soar. What god gave you a voice?
One who brushes, touches—
who has no certain end of caresses?
For some reason
a little beyond our horizon,
move like swarms
toward us. Come down the street
with dust and pollen.
Come over every puddle as a wave.
Move for some reason. Make the sand dunes
elegant truths.
Let their rest speak of what it takes
for a mountain to walk
in its sleep. Call that a kind of strength.
Call it the cost
of time, anchorless guest in the world’s house.
For no reason,
spin just like water in a drain,
taking and turning
leaves into knives and carving free this life—
unfeeling finger
dissolving into a heaven like a curse.
Move for no reason. Lift the bird
who teaches hope’s
distinction from ambition. A lighter life
rises like smoke.
So take a message to your god. Then come
and sweep mosquitoes
away like a forgotten summer laughter—
and, for some reason,
sink like a silken tent to the evening’s end,
and bring me love,
a musical ease of mingled breathing. We share
its lesson, the breeze
that fools a little spider into listening.
With fishlike hands, with light-bulb eyes,
snaked in the womb,
sutured by hunger to their world,
bodies grow.
Scars the most loving surgeons leave.
Clawed pods.
How do they fly and swim so free—
so far, so high?
The mind wonders, word and mood.
Active voices
snarl and keep on being, cell
unfurling cell
in blood and skin and bone.
With throats, with noses, and with tongues,
bodies hunt.
They prey on flowers, flies, and air,
a mix un-mingling,
a penetrating chance that’s fixed,
a hook, a fish,
a line a currency no depth,
no breadth contains:
the mind’s unending fitted name,
caseless number,
both lame and limber halts and haunts
around the heart
in blood and skin and bone.
With birth, with native soil and toil,
bent trees in wind,
slaves to the weird gaze of the soul,
bodies wither.
Sonnets in which lovers surge.
Breathing sod.
How do they bear their living seed—
their other selves?
The mind is silent, word and mood.
Passive subjects
charge and fire in every cell—
themselves are hell
in blood and skin and bone.
A fire of painted boards and brush
these kids build at that house they use
hosts a skinny sweating crush
each weekend. Small cars cruise,
seeping with voices. Angry shouts
past three AM don’t merit notice.
I go back to sleep. These are mouths
fed by petty crime and pettier motives.
Like the cheap foods that nevertheless
beat hunger, fights feed desire
long after there’s no hope of the sex
promised by the symbol of the fire.
But hungers return. They can’t be burned
or taught or bought or fought or learned.
I like to think you’re built of clustered aphids,
not a clutch of cells
dripping with images, but clogged bugs themselves
and their cements of
saliva—termites and chewstone towers. What are
you teemed with if not
roach legs and fly wings? Teach my heart—
and house it, too.
Your goo of beauty, your films, your hot dens
of dim glum proofs.
A limp plasm, you pulse somehow with shame,
a mirror melting me
whose pride is but a pageant of his doubts.
What are you built of? Hope and hurt and fear
spilling, spooling, drooling
milk drooping into the honey of my body—
trembling fevered string
elastic with music? What are you played with
but trick carbon keys?
Teem like peaceful army ants inside of me—
the sugar they
bear grain by grain to feed their thoughtful queen
is what I mean. A sweet
combustion, maybe a Heraclitan fire
whose lucky figure
shadows meanings and murders with my hand.
It will be cancers, heart attacks, and strokes
that fell us.
Parasites, pneumonia, bacteria
will kill us.
Our joints wear out. Plaques build inside our brains.
They tell us
the time is soon, the day we will be free—
but sadness
looms larger than every disease. It fits
no weird rigs
of DNA. It bears us down where no
down can tend,
an aimless center, like beauty’s endless end.
If seen, that beauty is bleeding out. The air
can’t reach us.
If heard, that beauty’s roar is like waters
that strand us
on eternity’s strange shore—what it means, it
can’t teach us.
The time is soon, a day we will be free—
and sadness,
bearing us home, keeping us snugly buried,
lets us see.
The yard is dark, and here the stars stay out—
small fierce words
the mice look up in our heart’s dictionary.
Lawrence Revard was born in St. Louis and currently resides in the Cheltenham neighborhood. He teaches in the College Writing Program at Washington University. He has published poems in Pleiades, New Orleans Review, Prairie Schooner, Raven Chronicles, New Letters, and elsewhere. His translations of John Milton’s Latin and Italian poems were published in Wiley-Blackwell’s Complete Shorter Poems in 2009.
