SAVAK ANMAIGA / I OPENED THE DOOR

The fictions of an eternal blue noon,
small throes of women in the engine
whose green tresses noiselessly tangle
into Artemisia tilesii as if bruised underfoot—

where he pelts the shadow cast down
upon a thin layer of new ice, never dry,
upon hollow bed of waters run again
into the notion of a distant silver chord.

I don’t advance a step. The mind, too—
erratic, distracted, is discontinuous at best.
 

MORE DISSIPATE

We strove to locate love on a list of symptoms
hyaline when held to light and found instead
nothing but bones, and of the sort you relish:

a kind of bicker in the throat. A jetblack end.
We thought we saw the dark cursive of a wolf
circling on sea ice, miles out, in an hour

not blue, though persuasive and brief.
In looking back, it was not dog. It wasn’t
anything. It was not the heart burst forth

but another part: one for which the words,
the shafts and shanks, their shifts, have long
been sung, and in the same breath, lost.

 

UPDATE ON J

She is beset by the recurrent burial of women
in grounds profane and consecrated.

If now amid crag and tundra, she would mull
the vapors of starry cassiope and smooth cliff fern.

Instead, a must of high swamp with its admirable
bolete, stream violet, green spleenwort.

Concerning her parents she is nostalgic.
Concerning another she is silent.

She would wish her arms and the arms
of her children to be fortunate.

On no day does she not comprehend
what is forbidden to her: a refusal of some

prohibitions. For instance, one must not consume
or traffic in lupine. Moved by conspicuous vice

she made confession and received the sacrament.
As well as she could you can see how she fared.

It is true that she wishes for a voice
to aid self-governance: though obedient

in many things we now find her color high
and too easily touched to the quick.

She did her best to conceal all intrigue
as she feared most your treacheries.

She has unlearned A from B. She knows little
of belief, less of being believed.

Held back from accomplishment,
she grows ill-content.

On a journey away she meets no hindrance
save a discontinuous thicket of alders

and anxieties before a semantic freedom
to be used fruitfully. She denies

that she has been failed. After all,
there is light all about.

The things she has done are not in despair but …

Language transforms her thoughts.
Thought, apprehensible to the senses.

Tomorrow she will not go out.
Tonight let us let her.