3 poems
Whose FAULT
however it began it ended like that. somewhere deep
in the Cartesian prairie, spring
is attempting herself. the sun peeling & pink.
cornfields & passions cast
their shadows. I had OD’d. our child had died. this
was happening in real time. like a tree falling
in the four dimensions.
if you dont you say. I will surely you say. it’s a flat, patient
Sunday & I am speechless, dreaming
you have made our decision. you are a child of trauma
&, I am learning, need something
to believe in. I am learning to love myself or,
more precisely, have learned to love myself in the decade
in which I have been married to you which
as it turns out will be the only married decade
of my life. on the horizon a thunderstorm gathers her
yellow & green. here where there is always
a thunderstorm gathering. before I can be
someone else I say. some gold & black birds flirt
over barbed wire, sing three uncorroded notes
to the sun, which is bathing your hair in the day’s last,
unsullied light. we watch the world turn,
starting over
what happens after STARTING OVER
the truth he says. anything but I say
the earth gives up her shadows & we are silent
& sundressed. between us sits a bowl
full of the fruits of life. we are arguing
with our backs to the sea. we
have been running out of words for days now,
here where the tide parcels up
the beach & the future sits down cross-legged,
for a tequila tonic. some seals bark
at the nothing the tide brings in. a hummingbird
rockets skyward. we are losing
our confidence in a future we can anticipate,
which is to say one of us is on the verge
of leaving the other but we are so close you can’t
tell which.
keep AWAY
a butterfly looking like an outstretched
hand with outspread fingers gathers
them together, flexes, releases
her transparent digits into an afternoon trembling
in the aftermath of a mid-June hailstorm.
in the beginning I say into a telephone I
have answered out of shock, fear, relief & some
other emotions that run too deep
to be named, we ignored
each other’s obvious flaws.
an out-of-tune Souza march parades
across the receiver. on the other end, a dogwood
describes herself to the sky
using leafy, amphibious gestures. the timeless
timber at the bottom of Lake Superior refuses her
appointment with death. even
when she is gone, the sun
chases her down. later on I say they became
so enormous we couldn’t see anything
else. you light a handrolled cigarette—or, at least
I imagine you lighting a handrolled cigarette
while you try to find words not bred of victimhood,
or the marriage that did not,
in the end, last.
that’s because I say I was looking
for myself in all the wrong places. a rainbow
dismembers & the sky drops low, fishing
for dusk. for years I have been proven
by this shame. for years I have written
through this shame, because if I cannot, as it
turns out, live
beautifully then perhaps
I can turn my shame into something
beautiful: like a child or a mad woman,
ghosts run across the telephone wires. crocuses
glisten. the wind slapping the leaves
& a street dog whimpers back. you
are exhausted. I can hear it, now. somewhere
in the middle distances of the middle west,
your voice seeking order in the chaos
of possible accusation.
everything I did. everything
I did not do. everything we promised split, like
a wishbone. it is
some poets say, the act of the lyric
to construct one thing out of its response to
another. you have Collette says,
to get old. repeat the words, not as a howl
of despair but as the boarding call
to a necessary departure.
over my left shoulder, the earth is lonely, & feels
forgotten. somewhere inside
the dark & resilient forest body, the horizon
wanders through
an abandoned spiderweb.
this is, I think, us
for now. inheriting the consequences—
Emily Carr writes murder mysteries that turn into love poems that are sometimes (by her McSweeney’s editors, for example) called divorce poems. After she got an MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, she took a doctorate in ecopoetics at the University of Calgary. These days, she’s the program director of the low-residency MFA in creative writing at Oregon State University-Cascades. Her newest book, Whosoever Has Let a Minotaur Enter Them, Or a Sonnet—, is available from McSweeney’s. It inspired a beer of the same name, now available at the Ale Apothecary. Emily’s first collection of fiction, Name Your Bird Without A Gun: a Tarot novella, is forthcoming from Spork in 2019. Visit Emily online at www.ifshedrawsadoor.com or on Instagram as ifshedrawsadoor.