Not gonna lie~it's been tough week. For almost four months now, I've been submitting resumes (3-15 per week day) and while, yes, I did get on the faculty roster at an excellent conservatory and yes, a year from now, I may have an incredibly robust studio...right now? I'm in limbo and it's everything listed on the poster.
“The Anxiety Offices,” by Lisa Russ Spaar
ReplyDelete1. Vespers
I wake from my insomnia
into this vanishing, gaze & its lust,
the world blue too.
I do not grieve, but am infected
by your absence, amber canto
corseted by black ash.
When I remember to pray,
it is an old conversation:
compromise, silence—
opalescence conscripted
by these closing silks, starlings
with their roosting sutras,
& eyelet memory that holds
the disappearing self in place—
2. Compline
What the bedroom triptych mirror,
which is to say, what I
once held—three children’s bodies
in quilted sanctuary
of felted animals, bolsters,
dolls staring, origami birds dropped
on invisible threads
from what might as well be heaven,
toward which, charmed,
flew their rote chimings,
if I should die—
now the halfway house of night
holds elsewhere: cars, lovers’ arms,
the exquisite anarchy of sky
crazed by arterial stars
in open field or private dreaming.
As must be. This too:
the snow-pale negligee
of privet hedge and street lamp
pressed to the wall,
& a single window, inked & deep,
that many light-blink thoughts
of what still holds me here
will touch and pass before I sleep—
3. Matins: Three Vigils
§
False alarm, the dormer blanched
with muslin wash of lone, twin headlamps.
Mute pane transparent, dream obdurate
& already as lost to me as any road.
§
Shadow on shadow: my body disappears.
What of the soul?
The old dog cries arthritically in sleep,
her secrets never more near.
When I lie with my love, we leave time.
Later, the shivering keel of his tongue
makes of our mouths a winged lung,
returning us to this very hour—
§
Uncompassed first light, tremolo,
& on the screened porch a trapped wren
chirrs & starts, swooping, pelting in wild
borderline vision my subterfuge heart,
her tea kettle, tea kettle, tea kettle scalings
fluently reassembling me.
4. Lauds
Salvific, the muddy hem
of my obscure guilt.
And though hindered sorely
by proud, myopic travail
I am none the less
boundless this morning,
trawling, under your sway,
winter’s counterfeit cages
wracked & rife & caroled
by the catalogue of all
I do and must learn to love
beyond my power to stay.
Sleep, my child, may peace attend thee, all through the night...
Ooooo. Gorgeous. Thank you.
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