In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011

Hard as Ash

H A R D A S A S H On September 20, 1938, Miss Newcombe, 22, combusted before a roomful of people while waltzing in a dance hall in Chelmsford, England. Blue flames erupted from her body and in a matter of minutes she was reduced to a small pile of ash. Some trees cannot grow without fire. Private catastrophes at the speed of Phaethon. What was X? Without faith an integer of light broke into cities of geometry. Define Y. In the desert it is all calculus. In an overcoat in winter, without socks I wandered into night. One by one all the bars fell into place. The day of the talking stones is no longer. The dreams of metamorphosis. The morning you woke up and for a moment forgot to call them “dead,” it was the morning of the poem. The subject is the content into which I step lovingly. This lapidary effect of all sons sets where houses invest the notions of “home” or “hearth” and heat 24 gives even as the earth rolls over into night and is contained or content to remain itself while still breaking into flower or streets with cadences of wind. Your musics insist to inform me by remaining plastic. With you I will revise the entire possibility of twilight. The day is woven into images we adhere to only memory of light against a screen door ajar. Then children’s faces appear. A thematic see-saw, silhouetted now—romantic and real. How can we say in this hour, who will resolve the interplay of your countenance, this ellipsis, the way you come to me pictorially, in time, with space that is real. Though someone will die and I’ll have to wear a tie, again. This is only a poem to say I love you. I love you too. I’ve been so happy. Happy! These sun notes bend the porpoise in my eye, quiet the pony inside. You know, when the creek meets the little paper hats floating out to sea. The cabby goes past your stop but the bar on the corner wears a preternatural smile, is more 25 companionable than what you call home. So you discover hospitality in tight pants where the traffic goes both ways. Has anyone asked you lately are you all right in your new homes and does your electric bill depress you when they cut your powwow? I was going to build you a flower. Then the day broke apart. Big leaves halved and greasy as a waxy stem revealed a voice I misplaced when I was a girl. It was summer and we were there and so was the phonograph and the missing relatives drowned earlier in the century during the great migration of sentences when words were collected with a winnowing fan. You should have seen it. I did. Then it was another day arrived unlike the stubble that had grown up before, clear and wide with a glint around all the small names belonging to the places they are keeping. When objects become the subject, a veritable picnic of description that spells glee on the new horizon. Time is our only subject and the mutability of forms. Time compact 26 and out of sight. I want the whole essay. Collocated with clouds and silver. Still, sky makes its cinematic sweep over this burg and to think we get to have coffee together now and then is pretty terrific don’t you think? I have come to tell of the discrepancies of light, material or otherwise. It makes no difference as the meal went to waste outside on the knoll where the neighborhood is tucked into the nights. Rest safely my beloved for I am coming. I was going about my business, the way I do and then from nowhere came a fable to my doorstep and would not let me alone. Not now. Not ever. This neon winked its marquee on my forehead and it flashed—true and good. Not just any good, but good as in a farmer’s prayer about earth and work and rest. O mommy is it true? Do these beans grow to the sky? It is the alphabet lies close to ground. Broken tile to marvel at and so much emotion goes into learning to make these letters. A spell against time. Chumming for clarity and a pronoun to share...