Villanelle for the Real World with a Line from Voltaire
Remember that all the known world is governed by books,
said Voltaire. The unknown, too, like the wastes
beyond your gates, takes shape as you look
up from the page. That dead land, darkened by rooks,
seethes with meaning, now that your mind has raced
to remember all the known world. Governed by books,
you’re prone to gaze out the window as the talk crooks
its way round the room. Your mind, like a horse, makes haste
beyond the gates, takes shape as you. Look,
you can barely tell who you are until time hooks
your flesh. The mind, always flying, is braced
to remember. All the known world is governed. By books
we are stolen away, set trembling, shook,
dispatched to borderless regions none has traced.
Beyond, the gates take shape. As you look,
the wild overtakes the known. This is all it took
to claim you once, child by wild embraced.
Remember that. All the known world’s governed by books.
Beyond the gates, desire takes shape. You look.
Primary School
The hardening runnels of sap I pressed my fingers in
as a child—only a child looks at pines so closely,
the way she watches the clear sap
leak from her scraped shin after blood stops
& wonders if this is how she will leave her body,
this little by little.
The child learns the words to songs—sings
untuned before sleep. Her brother chants
& rocks & falls asleep, sheet-wrapped & hot.
She likes to sing & feel her throat clench—
If you miss the train I’m on, you will know that I have gone…
She lies awake.
Once upon a time, words brought her sorrow—
Pyrite & Mica
For my brother
Summers, we camped near gem shows
booked in cheap hotels—blue or black velveted
tables of agate chessboards, malachite in trays,
an onyx menagerie we coveted. By an emptied mine,
crystals sharp as the name our father gave us
to call them: pyrite, two confident syllables,
mastery over those winking dice—a fortune
in foundering hope, common name: fool’s gold.
A pretty fantasy, until a test of hardness
& weight: then, brilliance had to be enough,
true metal untwinned from its image—
what could be enough to satisfy? We wanted
pockets full to rub our fingers on, to hold
all the way home in the new light of the words
we’d learned—aventurine. Rhodochrosite.
Rutilated quartz. The facts: snowflake obsidian
is volcanic glass. Semi-precious. We scuffed
around the empty hard clay lot next door,
unearthing rocks & bursting them,
thinking iron makes the clay this rusted red.
There, limestone lay in dull beads: shell & bone.
Sometimes, a chunk of quartz, dirt-white like teeth,
or, silvered opaque, a slab of mica, or granite
sequined with it. Fooled—we’d flake its layers,
watch it drift & cling to us like fish-scales,
peel papery, doll-sized windowpanes
to hold to our eyes, grayed monocles.
Poor transparency, call it isinglass, or shelter,
or portal, let its pigment be tint against glare
& dismantle mirages rising on the hot street.
Let it turn solid. Mineral. Its sudden beauty,
fraying crumbled edges. We’d gather
what we’d need to build small cities,
twinned, separate: selves we hadn’t given
to words. Mica could double as glass & shone
like silver. What didn’t fail us? Brilliance lasted
as long as light was a single thing touching down,
was rough & silvered in our hands,
let them make what they could, let them grow
strange to each other as each cell’d repeat itself,
double helices doubling & wrenched apart,
the membranes translucent, permeable, distinct,
defining. Replication. Division.
What we are now, we were then. We wanted
to rescue each other, builders of forms.
We knew the saw that cut rock would not cut skin.
But there were some names we’d never know, dark
shapes that rose in the dark of our eyes
in sleep. Solder & flux. In time, even
trees would turn to stone, what we trusted.
Beginning Geography
In another room, parents’ voices.
Syllables crowd & steamroll one another,
the murmur like distant construction
or demolition, edifice or vacant lot.
On the page before me, a list
of capital cities, lakes & rivers,
birds & flowers. Maps in pastel colors.
All the wonder of the world translated,
packed for my daily travels. The book,
with its fragrance of tedious wisdom,
lies open & shut at once. Open or
shut, the door to this room, as to each
room in the house, is barricade & freeway.
Inside & outside are its subjects.
Inside & outside, the citizens
claim what they can for themselves.
Into the Woods
Under a tarp strung clear across dewy,
heavy air, we sleep communal
on crackling plastic in the dark acres
behind the lake. There is singing
by guitar & spider-hunt by flashlight
held to the forehead, a way to leave
the fire & hold hands with someone
a few charged moments. Then back,
no secrets showing. We think it’s chance
the way the cabins are paired, this boys’
with that girls’, not the counselors’ design,
who together sleep by the fire, away
from their charges. In the first quiet
of lying down, some girl tells the story:
entire camping groups missing in the woods,
or maybe one girl at a time, maybe only
those who strayed alone too far into the trees.
The last ones to fall asleep hear a carnival
of sound, amplified with every cracking twig,
every rhythm that must, we fear, be footfalls.
Daddy-Long-Legs tickles us like night’s fingers.
Soon, someone wakes with a kick, sits up, touched
on her face or hair. We’re 12, 13, 14.
We hear something’s there before we can name it.
Badlands & Canyon
From old Route 66 in Arizona,
neon diners release us to this:
Triassic floodplain, desert basin. Rock
trees litter these bitten dunes; under them
sleep stone dragons. Roped-off rooms of a pueblo
in ruins are backdrops for family
photos—Smile! Once, we read, a swollen river
tore trees from roots, washed them north to strange land,
scoured ripe earth clean & painted it iron
& manganese, reds, yellows, indigos,
black, carbon-gray. On vertical faces,
glyphs of a language we cannot decode—
still, we argue over meanings as if
rightness won loyalty, as if knowing
were a trophy. Archaeology loves
its trowels & calipers, its screens,
augurs, & scales. Spruce & palm, an agate
forest lies cracked to the sun like fruit,
Aladdin’s jewel-garden at my feet.
If I fill my hands & pockets, am I
a thief or lover? At an overlook,
my brother beside me, my mother
& father, so small—I can almost reach
them, each alone in a desert, descending
between canyon walls, finding river’s green,
its chanted story dreamlike & rife.
This is birth—each of us into silence
that locks the canyon to a sky distant,
flecked with hawks. We climb bald, shifting dunes,
shadows like ciphers spelling ourselves
to ourselves in the ruins before us.