You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior, and: [If I say ghost, would you]
- You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior, and: [If I say ghost, would you]
You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior
it was all roadside flowers & grasses growing over the cities
was made of wilderness & sky with God washed out of it
was the foreign prayer-word it was a list of missing persons
was the solid bronze charging bull on the famous street
was like the Roman method for making bees
was its taken-down carcass & its bed of apple branches & thyme
was a new anatomy, a beaten hide, a skeleton sweetening to glowing fluids,
& the bee born out, & the grist of them born glistening as coins
it was anthem was the listening,
the way a searchlight listens over a lake it was the prayer-word out of your mouthyour thousand-noun request it goes up up to the florescent weather
was an ivory box, [End Page 139]
was hurdle & burn, burning through the infinite, your overbright comet
was made of stones, made of berries & box tops & eggshells it was like the word having reached the ear
& the words pollinated the dark, there was darkness there, like the after-hours inside a library [End Page 140]
[If I say ghost, would you]
If I say ghost, would youhear the helium
airship, white & wide humming with lifting gas
Will yours be rememberedlike a Goodyear, gigantic
I made a study of whitein a notebook, a study of failing or falling
I try to explain the self—
where I used to see a single hallwayI now hold a snow globe in the mind
& the weather here is touchablewhite creeping phlox, whitesqual,the word leafage comes
softly, it falls like pale underleavesflickered, like Styrofoam, like pills like bridal dresses
quiet mob of gowns & vowsSuch elegant equationsthis hard math
of free fallAlready the houris less than an hour [End Page 141]
Carolina Ebeid is a fellow at the Stadler Center for Poetry, where she helps edit West Branch. She is also a poetry editor for the online journal Better: Culture & Lit. Her work appears in journals such as the Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, Memorious, Gulf Coast, Poetry, and others. She holds an mfa from the Michener Center for Writers and has also been awarded prizes and fellowships from the McNair Scholars Program, CantoMundo, and the Academy of American Poets. She grew up in West New York, New Jersey.
