Alias
Beyond Atonement
Cocteau to Marais
Elegy with Fish and Tofu
Harder Than Granite
Her Dead Friend, Seven Thousand Miles Away
Humanescence
Mining
Need
Portable Missionaries
Saint Geneviève
The Campground
No more use said her note the day she left
the kitchen unscrubbed, dog tethered
to stake, no money for the paperboy.
Wars are fought not only in fields and market-
places, but in the plush dimmed parlors
of ordinary houses. What’s lost
amid clumps of dust, limp
greens in the fridge, chips in the good
china but that spirit, too
bellows-flat to summon. It was dawn,
cold, two states away
before she ceased to be herself,
took the first job with a pink uniform,
nights long with the silver length of hauled things.
Back home, murky days of dragging the lake.
Just back from the nursing home
and it rent my heart to see her
dog poised by the cellar door,
uncertain whether pets ride down
or up at the end. If it's true grief
is read in the plaintive faces of dogs,
the mutt knew this day had trailed
off without leaving its scent, that tilted
terrier-stare starting the whole body
to bereftness; not sure the leap to bed
would find the long-time companion, not
sure of chicken bits slipped between spokes
of wheelchairs, not sure of any familiar
thing, uncharacteristic of a creature always
sure of herding the Nana the small length
to the bath, of the Sphinx-pose guard
at her feet to ward off falls or some too-long
sleep, of the noon nap with blanched
hands just able to grasp a soft ear, which now
unfolds at every house-frame creak and click
for a wisp of her. Lucky pup to have been spared
the naphthalened lie that hitchhikes from an empty
spare room up a pitted highway to shared
windowless chambers lacerated midline by latex
curtains: the commodious fib that families will out-
do a stranger’s glossed and antiseptic care,
and would always rescue the last usefulness
that sleeps in plain sight, unseen.
--for Richie Hofmann
Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot
and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing
on the black earth. But I say it is
what you love.
--Sappho (trans. Anne Carson)
What we love becomes our life: I do not give
up the granite moment I grip you, neon
declarations percussed across your stubbled
throat: the hotel sign’s violet pulses of blithe
lust through our window, from whose rain-
doused view we’ve swallowed tartly amid ruckus,
sheet-twined swells beneath our dare to jam
the stocks of intimate joust. And if we covet the street-
lamped stranger, it is because we recognize his angled
head from an ancient statue, which if by the brush
of linened thigh at an unexpected corner were revived
into a living tableau, would reach to jewel with soft
hands a constant mirrored body as if adorning
himself, marbled with reflexive desire.
Swollen kaleidoscope fish blow
kisses near the glass facing
my table. This is not love,
but exile. Striding upright
on land, as your ancestor dared,
I would barely reach your blinkless
tourmaline eyes. Rectangle-bound
in water of kitchen window-
girth, you can neither roam
nor flee nor lust in private.
I surmise you are designed
to calm Arizona
diners, locked as we are
by pocked mountains and devils
of dust that slough
off skin in desert-
skimming winds, alien
to notions of liquid other
than oases that comfort
across vast saguaro
distances like television
propaganda. While filigreed
fins barely swirl, the tofued
bolus rakes my throat
as I track your slow sink,
then defeated float to a surface
you can break, only to suck
a gill-imploding rush
of air before you’re sifted
through piped bubbles,
drift the circuit you’ve inscribed,
ceaseless, through my meal,
pleading with engorged
pouts not to be freed,
but for me to drown
with you on this tiled
seabed the beige of plastic
pebbles mounded in the tank.
If I could only flood
this room to the level of the artificial
suns cupped into the ceiling,
swoosh the monsoon
torrents inside, drench the silk
potted ferns into breathing
kelp. And I would drown,
serenely, unable to atone
for the freedoms
of the grandmother—
(who jubileed the roaring
brook in which she traced
the roe of a thousand citrine
panes of beating life)
—I circumscribed
to the depth of one square
room, facing east
to a fathomless forest.
Sundays are nails flayed below the quick. Can you believe
they spin this place as a “pleasant rural retreat”
and not an armory of the slouched and squatted dead
who rise, occasionally, for games of bridge
or rarely tetherball? Where the gala event’s
the saunter of the simpering arthritic set
with co-medicated dogs? The docs assume you’re set
if you confide in your hound, given you don’t believe
in their skills of cure. In the ethics-approved event
hidden mics in doggy’s collar snatch your chat, retreat
to nearby cellphone towers for signal-scramble, or the bridge
under which fish are fed hoarded pills until their floating death.
Any other patients—oops, visitors—up at 2 a.m. besides the dead?
Some might well be moths for all the talk they give, set
in their insular ways to value sleep as the sodden bridge
they’d traipse to peace or satiety. As to heaven and hell, I believe
they’re metaphors, and faced with factual oblivion, would retreat
running backwards on their hands, a globally-televised event
I’d watch on a loop till my brother atoned for the near-torture events
in which my childhood stewed longer than pots of squirrels, dead,
Nana spiced in the season of starvation the government’s retreat
from compassion nourished. No food, here, unpuréed then set
in the aspic of despair, which dashed with the leavening of belief
you’ll outlive your fear, goes down knotty like the rope bridge
over-salted, soaked with exes’ tears, a tonic to bridge
the gap in friendless years. Unlike wards of yore, no dire events
enliven the beige repeat of group and walk and snack. Believe
the hanging kitty poster and you’ll strive strive strive till the dead
weight of hope finally cracks in your mouth like icing set
too long in the pan. I yearn for the dashied taste of the moon in retreat
from the stares of yowling thoughts out locked windows, true retreat
in the woods of recompense that would be, the trail smooth and bridged
not with the zeal of mere confession, but with grouted atonement set
in my joints. Outside, the owls ask why why why and the causal event
eludes me. Why do gusts dislodge the well-deserved mouse, all dead,
from the starving hawk? Why is the sole word harder than granite believe?
The moon will set and I’ll have my visa to leave the country of the dead.
No matter how darkly the stars retreat, I sense no permanent night to believe
some inner event horizon looms. The light begins, latticed, like a bridge.
Her Dead Friend, Seven Thousand Miles Away
The Thai say when a gibbon dies, it leaves
seven lonely rivers. Each of seven days a search
she’d invoke under chimerical temples’ masoned eaves
to discover how, among monoecious white birch,
her dispossessed friend might be altered: lotus
in pond, moon, music of stars, or the way light
unfolds through spider-silk skin of swift myotis
gliding seven levels of heaven, or seven white
steps to the roof of Doi Inthanon, lover to sacred
waters, those seven fingers of azure scrawled
through green groves. Seven years her friend, plaited
in moss and wandering as mist on mountains enthralled
in cataracts, gone. Seven eras in land that shared her name;
seven tears sweep the Bodhisattva’s face of love untamed.
She burrows in alleys so the tin
sound of what degrades
us will dampen on the pavement. Snow
thick in cracks, rain seeps
down, a muttered rant. All she needs
is the sun’s kind of clean
in how we think, as she knows
we can have ourselves with nothing
in the way. Across the city, men
spin desire upon desire, indistinguishable
bodies in one-bulb nights
surge and sink beside them
until they almost think
there’s no longer a word
for want. Once, in a bar,
she saw a stranger lean to lick
a lost one’s face. A volcano poured
through her then, raining the vanquished
love for what is maimed. She burned
awake till dawn, when the edges
of rock on the hillside sharpened
in the light, and she could see where a path
had been worn away. All night,
something small and insistent
traveling the only course it knows.
He hacks the last vein
open, breathes alkaline sweat
and rock commingled on his axe,
and is fulfilled. His metropolis
the sum of holes, deep holes,
cankered into tunnels dank
with piss and condensate,
where men grubble for nodes of gold,
pried from scrags of buried mountains.
This is heaven under earth.
All around, coronal glow of head-lamps,
the calming meter of swing and hulk,
strike and sweep, the slimy warmth
of men back-to-back in narrow tabernacles of stone.
Everything above mirrors what’s below,
he thinks, and imagines the secret life of minerals
marbles the underside of men’s souls.
This is water, wine, earth, air.
He cups a lode in one callused hand
while the other searches what has been cleft
for his purpose, luminous as work.
--for Jack Gilbert
For water. A long road on which to swim
my life out to its mote
against the horizon. Being tricked
by those waves of desert heat,
when it’s only more desert, that boiled unwanting.
When you held out your arm along that half-
burned night, I thought all that was liquid
ran in the roots of your hand. That your upturned
palm was an offer to drink, not the first motion
of pouring something out. That my need could seal,
sear its will, live on dry land.
Let the curtain fall,
slip out the back before
having to explain you can’t find god
in their book. Maybe not even in some white arc
of birches that tunnel their reach toward you,
a promise that nothing breathes in vain.
Take the rocky path along the brook,
bide time in limbo,
ticks gathering on your pants-leg
on the way to the sandpit. Since your last battle
here with belief, red dogwood and switch grass
have sprouted in the sand, deer returned,
and juvenile delinquents tossed shot-
gun shells among the mica-paned rocks
you collected as a kid. You think missionaries
have it easy; just pocket a book,
hop any bus, and hark: redemption.
The spirit travels light, needs nothing
so heavy as the silver bell
you wear on a bracelet. Ring it now
in the fallible air, call
for something beyond your sight.
I climb limestoned heights of the Left
Bank to gaze at the Panthéon, closed. No
more tourists. Only two stooped men with farmer’s
hands whisper with me to invoke the exiled
saint where we rest, to feel her voice
gathering in the square, Où j’irai? Where
will I go? These stones and marbled
shifting light raised for her, patron saint
of Paris, hurler-back of enemies and illness.
Miracles doubted, her remains disinterred
to make room for France’s famous dead
men, permanent citizens. Her true home
crouches in a low-lying street, a Gothic
sanctuary for shards of her bones. I travel
down this mountain as evening begins
its ascent, walk as if not wanting to disturb
someone’s sleep, there is that kind of quiet.
And all the terrace houses seem little parish
churches, all the pansied flower-boxes let fall
some floc of twilight across façades of inner
buildings, the ones you’ve dreamt with rose-
inflected walls, apartment rows unfolding
along the narrowest angled street, a granite
length I squint down to the point where a house
becomes a dark full stop.
When will they find me, she thinks, scrapes
the new skin of panic, plunges it under
rust-tinged soil with her remaining
fingernails. Two days and what sounded like dirt
bikes, pick-ups, had passed by the mouth of campfire-
singed trail where she'd been dragged, green
plastic jump rope around her neck. She still
can’t believe her luck, those teenaged girls
playing hooky in the woods, stopping to light
their joints just out of sight of the tree
where she's tied. Why'd the man stop, turn, fold
into the woods when he could've finished
us all. Giggled gossip and the unisoned crunch
of twigs underfoot fading, only the feral
kind of call and response. A sudden metal
snapped clang with baby’s shriek—how—no, fox
kits orphaned now—they have such sharp teeth. The teeth
of summer thinly bared against the bloomed
purple of dusk. Tomorrow will be louder.
She dips her hands into her neck
to see if the gash has grown deeper. How long
would it take for the blood to run out, for the sun
to turn over, light the other side of the world.
Alexandra Burack, Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and author of the chapbook, On the Verge, has recent work in The Sewanee Review, Metphrastics, The Missing Slate, and Bulb Culture Collective, among many other venues. She serves as a Poetry Editor for Iron Oak Editions, and a Poetry Reader for The Los Angeles Review, The Adroit Journal, and $ Poetry is Currency. She enjoyed a 45-year career as a college multi-genre creative writing professor, and currently works as a freelance editor, writing coach, and tutor. Her website is: https://www.alexandraburack.com.
