Emma De Lisle
I
A boy zips by on a bicycle and rings his bell three times.
If even the womb can harbor a tumor, it is possible that memory
outgrows its purpose.
It is possible, May tells Henry, that everything will let me go.
.
Time
is like that. It means there grows thicker
II
a veil of experience hanging about the body an
aura caked and layered over every sense so rarely
can I look even upon leaf without every of its cousins
ever I saw crawling it over as though I live I must
.
We have many hidden expectations of each other I must
.
be a series of trip wires tangling stumbling each another
clamoring
you have seen its like before you have seen before now
you have lived ere you live it now there was once another and
time another there was once a moment there is a moment
that is not this one there was once a leaf
as though it were Memory who were Maker
as though Leaf I could Make
III
getting or gotten to a new point
of empathy with all her surroundings May
writes in her journal
she tells the dog she sits in her grandmother’s rocker today I
saw Henry he was in the dogwood bush he was flowering he
had so many arms you know almost a tree by now really
.
siren whistle slung low over the square arcing
IV
Matter loves a still point but bears not its weight. Assume
a cavern
in fulfillment and its denial we read signs like
weddings not to mention speaking to one another and dreaming
words hang in the air and we fit our mouths to them
does the mind read first or the body breathe there was none
before you to love
never before had I been any lover
nay there before you none
Do not cross the sea for virtue May pronounces watching
the dog nosing her flank in the foxglove bed
V
pleasure is to be enmired in a glowing web of points to touch each one lightly
VI
It was first just in the eyes of his brothers their two daughters soon
in their lips and feet fingernails even until a body anyone’s
body until everything started becoming became clearer to her
May rocks, thinking, wicker
is just like the mind
blue biplane silvering through an orange sky a pickup
half sunk in the road
.
we measure
VII
by these things, but we don’t have to
.
It is a ruse, the Mind
telling Leaf, I write you
line over line. Ramify
VIII
.
IX
Loving you is the only reason I feel I must reckon with my death,
May says to the dog.
The body loves its revolt on condition of mastery
time known by its feet
time unable but to be two
time only by its vow
When God makes a breath he repeats it; If I had words I would use them
to repeat my hands
He would have told the water
Go down from the mountain for you have seen my face
and must the water have run chattering blushing grown ever fuller carving
that countenance its memory down down
the rock meeting the dogwood tree in its abundance saying you must
change everything you must help me
leave off your branches
turn your roots over to the sky there comes a need
.
to flower them
.
Henry I never told you there are two times
that you make me miss my childhood: in my speech rendered
soundless and open an auguring of joy or of grief both times I
miss it aching age when I was so full of God and yet been none but His
each point wants a beauty that can rob it of all wisdom
each wanting sets all its kin humming
X
The way to summon a return is to write it.
A honey flush of knowing surging
—vivify—a shock of tributaries icy
may I salt my mouth I did not miss you but
dreamed that I did
.
youth is marked with a conviction that the moon turns straight from full to new
XI
without a breath in between something vanishing in its becoming a fullness into its own expectancy
To leave home is to practice dying
but yet more so to return
.
I should have started writing it down a long time ago,
May writes, and then she stops.
I should have started writing a long time ago, she tells Henry.
XII
It is memory, finally, that kills a man.
With satisfaction May thinks:
we read expectations like a text that confuses the words within and up
at the meeting he said hey for a minute there I thought I knew you
maybe something in the eye or the smile but hell you know what I don’t
think we’ve ever met but sit down here and don’t mind the dog that bell
gets her going stay a bit why don’t you it sure is nice to see a new face
And the tall man laughs takes off a flowered hat kicks his shoes against
the porch loosing some dirt says tell you what Henry there’s a whole lot
more where this came from
.
pleasure is to be to the lover a lost thing returned
but truth is like the clear eye of the roe
who does not wish to hide
who cannot hide and does not wish to
come back to me like this
.
To see something geometric as a sphere, May writes,
you must add infinite angles