First Fruits
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FIRST FRUITS
The life discloses itself only once
it has burst. In a district inaccessible by ear,
afloat before a deep blue bruise in the sky,
the professional in his cerulean scrubs
gives up, darkens. Sunday drains
through capillary saplings, four-hour drip
beneath the impending dusk, clouds so low
that breathing is underwater labor.
Same distant fin flicker.
Same anemic intervals dim
on your palate.
When you part faint leaves
to taste the air, you hardly remember
which figure, breast or benignant pear
you were expecting.
Your day’s a bone knitting,
a bargaining. This branch bent
like a bicycle fender, a section scar
where you shouldn’t have held
a second stomach.
Are you okay, my flickering gill?
No. No sleep. No trout.
Your mouth grows impatient of the night-
stem crushed between brain
and tongue.
This twig
your finger remembers being bitten off
at the joint. Then the sliver
of whimpering pain. The obstetrician
rolls up in the fishpond, still alive.
DAY OWL
Pinching asterisks of bread from a paper cone,
you look into a basin in the park
and scribble back injuries
ringed in rust. You float a full face
from before this life, reflect
as a woman regaining her footing.
From a birdbath locked in hexagonal stones,
sparrows arrow in the air, greened
like the slate-colored rock dove
which loiters in the shade of your umbrella.
It’s time to recover your crosshatch of nerves
from the cloud-textured
crack in the pad. Find lines
to redesign a basin in the park, the quill a squirt
of birdbath, the pen shaft as curvaceous
as Sargeant’s Madame X. And what if you made out a letter
for this rustle of plume in the woods?
One for the sibilant business tie, yellow slash
under six-faceted lamp? What of the squirrelly questions
on benches, and the face between lamplight
and lamplight, its sharp-nosed
rapacity winged
to be captured
with one bright stroke of your nib?
LITTLE ART PLOT
Then I burst out crying. I dreamed
it was not a knife that had come
between us, not the sight of love
scrubbed down in its own blood,
but the oily, sticky feel of recalling
your skin slipping through my fingers.
Naked, antiqued by the mildew-yellow
nimbus of a mosquito-lamp, your marble leg
emerged from a bath of black enamel.
Blue leaves ticked to pewter in the gust.
I knew you'd be back, with a copper Cupid
lightning-soaked in green flames
on your pillow, you two embedded in clouds
over the poet's grave, out of the frame.
IT WAS NOBODY
-After Jiménez
--It was nobody. Just water.—"Nobody?
So there is no body of water?"--No
body is here. Just a flower.—"Nobody is here?
But a flower has no body?"
--Nobody is here. It was just wind.—"Nobody?
The wind has no body?"--No
body is here: Illusion.—"There is nobody?
Then there is no body of illusion?"
ON THE OFF SEASON
(Eight months)
1.
Brittle ribbon
of autumnal yellow seaweed
pauses, fidgets
at my foot.
2.
When I lose my footing,
the November horizon
skips by the notch
in this “DANGER” sign.
3.
Loose tail of the last dead
horseshoe crab
is a surf
metronome.
4.
Midwinter dock is pounding
to hold back the roar where,
everywhere, torn manes
wipe the shore I can’t wipe
from my eyes.
5.
Unthawed sand is rust-stained
from buoy-chains,
dyed blood-blue
from gloves twisted
like hornets drowned
in amber.
6.
A huge March heron
meticulously examines
an empty oil barrel.
7.
The last of those ghosts
is like the blouse which snaps
from a woman a man
will carry until
his knees break down.
8.
I break off to consider
I never considered
the spring sea a baby
rolling in oblivion, splashing
in pink air.
The life discloses itself only once
it has burst. In a district inaccessible by ear,
afloat before a deep blue bruise in the sky,
the professional in his cerulean scrubs
gives up, darkens. Sunday drains
through capillary saplings, four-hour drip
beneath the impending dusk, clouds so low
that breathing is underwater labor.
Same distant fin flicker.
Same anemic intervals dim
on your palate.
When you part faint leaves
to taste the air, you hardly remember
which figure, breast or benignant pear
you were expecting.
Your day’s a bone knitting,
a bargaining. This branch bent
like a bicycle fender, a section scar
where you shouldn’t have held
a second stomach.
Are you okay, my flickering gill?
No. No sleep. No trout.
Your mouth grows impatient of the night-
stem crushed between brain
and tongue.
This twig
your finger remembers being bitten off
at the joint. Then the sliver
of whimpering pain. The obstetrician
rolls up in the fishpond, still alive.
DAY OWL
Pinching asterisks of bread from a paper cone,
you look into a basin in the park
and scribble back injuries
ringed in rust. You float a full face
from before this life, reflect
as a woman regaining her footing.
From a birdbath locked in hexagonal stones,
sparrows arrow in the air, greened
like the slate-colored rock dove
which loiters in the shade of your umbrella.
It’s time to recover your crosshatch of nerves
from the cloud-textured
crack in the pad. Find lines
to redesign a basin in the park, the quill a squirt
of birdbath, the pen shaft as curvaceous
as Sargeant’s Madame X. And what if you made out a letter
for this rustle of plume in the woods?
One for the sibilant business tie, yellow slash
under six-faceted lamp? What of the squirrelly questions
on benches, and the face between lamplight
and lamplight, its sharp-nosed
rapacity winged
to be captured
with one bright stroke of your nib?
LITTLE ART PLOT
Then I burst out crying. I dreamed
it was not a knife that had come
between us, not the sight of love
scrubbed down in its own blood,
but the oily, sticky feel of recalling
your skin slipping through my fingers.
Naked, antiqued by the mildew-yellow
nimbus of a mosquito-lamp, your marble leg
emerged from a bath of black enamel.
Blue leaves ticked to pewter in the gust.
I knew you'd be back, with a copper Cupid
lightning-soaked in green flames
on your pillow, you two embedded in clouds
over the poet's grave, out of the frame.
IT WAS NOBODY
-After Jiménez
--It was nobody. Just water.—"Nobody?
So there is no body of water?"--No
body is here. Just a flower.—"Nobody is here?
But a flower has no body?"
--Nobody is here. It was just wind.—"Nobody?
The wind has no body?"--No
body is here: Illusion.—"There is nobody?
Then there is no body of illusion?"
ON THE OFF SEASON
(Eight months)
1.
Brittle ribbon
of autumnal yellow seaweed
pauses, fidgets
at my foot.
2.
When I lose my footing,
the November horizon
skips by the notch
in this “DANGER” sign.
3.
Loose tail of the last dead
horseshoe crab
is a surf
metronome.
4.
Midwinter dock is pounding
to hold back the roar where,
everywhere, torn manes
wipe the shore I can’t wipe
from my eyes.
5.
Unthawed sand is rust-stained
from buoy-chains,
dyed blood-blue
from gloves twisted
like hornets drowned
in amber.
6.
A huge March heron
meticulously examines
an empty oil barrel.
7.
The last of those ghosts
is like the blouse which snaps
from a woman a man
will carry until
his knees break down.
8.
I break off to consider
I never considered
the spring sea a baby
rolling in oblivion, splashing
in pink air.
Stephen Massimilla is a poet, scholar, professor, and painter. His latest multi-genre volume, Cooking with the Muse: A Sumptuous Gathering of Seasonal Recipes, Culinary Poetry, and Literary Fare (Tupelo, 2016), won the Eric Hoffer Book Award and many others. Previous books include The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat (an SFASU Press Prize selection); Forty Floors from Yesterday (Bordighera/CUNY Poetry Prize); Later on Aiaia (Grolier Poetry Prize); a critical study of myth in poetry; and translations of books by Neruda and others. His work has appeared recently in AGNI, Barrow Street, Chelsea, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Literary Review, Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, The Southern Poetry Review, Verse Daily and many other journals and anthologies. Massimilla holds an MFA and a PhD from Columbia University and teaches at Columbia University and The New School.
(For more info: www.stephenmassimilla.com and www.cookingwiththemuse.com)