Poetry
touched. Like magnets
on a table, edged closer
and closer, but never enough
for their fields to intersect and for
their arms to seek the other’s flesh.
Almost.
Like live wires,
unclothed, held near enough
to know the existence of the other,
but too far apart for the spark
to arc from lip to lip.
Like the moment has everything
it needs: right person, right place,
but —
London, September 1665
The term “doctor” is
subject to interpretation.
Scythe-beaked, stinking crow,
black wax angel in the doorway,
doused with rose and bergamot,
you wouldn’t know a pustule
from the shiny fever coins
clinking in your pockets.
London’s contract says you’ll
cull the afflicted from the pure,
but everyone looks infected
through blood-tinted lenses,
and no one wants to peer too close
at the conductor shaking his cane
before the keening choir.
Seven thousand a week, coins or corpses,
make your money while you can:
a thick coat and a beak full of incense
won’t save you from this city’s rot.
I.
I would like to be the dust,
stowing away on your fingertips,
when you pull a slender volume
of seldom-read poetry off
the oak shelves of a nearly-
vacant library.
II.
The library doesn’t need to be
nearly-vacant: it could be full
of school children, of politicians,
of artists, and I would still like
to be the dust your fingertips
glean from poetry books no
one has read, but you, since
I last read them.
III.
I would like to be the dust
on your fingertips, and your
fingertips, gliding along each
rhyming line, and each line
the poet never rhymed with
anything. I would like to be
your fingertips, touching
poetry, and the dust on your
fingertips, touching poetry.
IV.
I would like to be the dust
of poetry you are touching.
V.
I would like to be the dust of a
nearly-vacant library, rhymed
on your fingertips with every
word you read.
VI.
The dust does not have to be
that of a nearly-vacant library:
it could be the dust of school
children, of artists, of politicians,
and I would still like to be dust
rhyming with you.
VII.
I would like to be the dust
of poetry you have touched.
I woke up this morning
in a tar pit.
Bedsheets thick sticky
with black worry, pillow
sweat yellow to my skull
with nightmare
and night sweats.
I am thinking of mammoths
in La Brea, how I too
will be fossilized in this mire
if I can’t wash myself off
and stand up.
There’s an ache in my chest,
muscle and bone mimicking
the muck fist that clutches
my spirit. It is anchored
to the bedsprings, to the frame,
and I’m afraid if I lift myself up,
it will tear the heart out of me.
I exhaust myself with heaving
thrashes, and only bury deeper.
But,
I am also thinking of a Beatles song,
a small weak voice crooning from
somewhere beyond the tar,
a gentle reminder in the shape of a melody
that no one I want to save
can’t be saved,
even myself
and I want to go in search of it,
but how?
Tiny gestures.
Swallow pill,
brush teeth,
bathe body,
drink sunlight,
and feel the bog ease off,
even if it rages.
I will love myself in tiny spasms
and dig myself out
at least for today.
— Adam Kamerer
Tonight the moon is a scythe.
She reaps
the stalks of stars
from a field so spacious,
its harvest refuses
to be weighed.
The sand rabbit tells the desert cow:
I want to lie beside your open bones.
The rigid spurs of your joints
pressed against my fur.
Shelter for your sacrifice.
I’ll hide in the hollow
where your mind once dwelt
and sleep until the sun
quells his angry shine.
What I found in the earth at Brierfield:
shards of white china, a deer bone knife,
a slave mother’s beads carved by hand,
and what I found in the earth at Tannehill:
two thousand iron nails, door hinges,
hearth stones still scented with rain and earth.
In the clay, I even excavated myself.
Even when the mornings are cold,
I enjoy watching you wake: I enjoy
your spine, its stretch and curve,
your arms reaching out so far
you might be trying to grasp the air
and pull it on for a shawl to clothe
your bare and goosebumped shoulders.
Your round mouth greets the world.
I enjoy your naked legs, heels to hips,
slinking out from tangled sheets,
across me, smooth and straddling
and then I enjoy watching you walk,
every morning, as if your small toes
are excited to touch the ground again
because they have been too long from it.
There is nothing harmless about inertia.
Inertia is doing all I can
to keep from crashing into you,
and crashing into you anyway.
It is pouring love like cement
into a sidewalk crack that won’t fill up.
It is being rooted to the spot,
unable to grasp your hand,
when I ought grasp it.
It is words spilling out when I ought stifle them
and words not said when I ought say them.
It is being unable to love an unfilled crack.
There is nothing harmless about inertia.
Bodies in motion stay in motion.
Bodies at rest stay at rest.
I keep finding you like fossils.
Brittle dusty relics unearthed
from the bottoms of boxes
and drawers. A pair of your
shoes in the trunk of my car,
still petrified with dried river
mud, from that time we hiked
along the Cahaba.
We hiked the river years ago,
but chip away the clay and the shape
of your foot is in my hand again.