Elena Karina Byrne
Hadewijch of Antwerp, Mouth to Mouth in a Wild Desert
Beguine, mistress of beguinage
knew her Middle Dutch, her mind like a flown letter,
in the season of darkness
(where darkness is to bear fruit slowly)…
Because her deepest abyss is her most beautiful form, this
was her calling, her bottom of the lake’s embroidered wardrobe from
its locked closets dragged out to the desert
where dying animals, like her body, refused food,
waited for rain. Ink bled from thorn and perfect flower
because, then as now, to dream is to imagine inside the hermetic room
above the head, to live in the same fervor which makes the stranger a neighbor,
each word a rough rock carried in the mouth for miles…
“For verily I say to you,
I am fourteen visions, Visionenen from the madness of love
where I shall never Unfree myself.
And I, whatever she may be,
there come to look for my brave love, my knight-errant to wonder at me, meaning she...
from the course taken, from heat, sand
in the hair, mirage whose mirror is that letter where one might stray, see
all lifted skirts of sky on fire, the years’ split ribs!"
Idea
“I love his eyes. They are a little larger
than visible things” ––Valery
...but single key conclave is not this. Nor nail to the lightbulb shell.
The full force of passion comes to you,
row of glittering water glasses, tall, along the floor,
after counting, oh after air... in and out of itself, this room swims.
Your hair like a torch, body of water, you,
the mind's fishhook threaded, a haunted syntax toward
Aristotle’s definition of God, “thought of thought,”
so far inside where
attention is coercion. Knock, Knock.
And you, wronged in pairs, couplet for couplet,
never to sleep again….yet: with conjuring
cap, Book of Hours open, hungry salt fire, with
Mr. Alchemy’s mercury vapor, color-key,
moon & dragon at your knee,
you have large eyes. Now, go away and come back: waking & waking.
Whereupon speech’s "follow" and "fall" becomes your direction,
the very psychology a verb can make,
so you move, the room moves.
Now,
consider the cement chair and know
instead, periphery.
Probability
-Feeling
…whereof a little / More than a little is by much too much.
Where, there, once people who carried tiny moonlit icebergs in their lungs,
the floating. They could sing northern darkness. Then, silence like a mass
grave got bigger but they didn’t dig there. They shoveled & shoveled
the horizon, shoveled past the blue to get down to the red name tag tied to
Death’s big toe. Longing was too many wings and not enough air. It is not
always a relief to be a child. Some are forced to conceal grenade pins in
their hair. Some are made large, forced to be their own parents, each lie
like a baby tooth falling out of their heads, to be slowly replaced, each peg
pushing up & up through the gum loam. Because eating was feeling, not eating,
feeling, & some god, the fleshless expert between them, whose laugh could
not be distinguished from a cry down here, gave no sign, every sign. So,
disappointment like 50 bowtied moths gathered over your face in a funeral
grey. The body that began, now aches & aches & earns its next leaf boat,
its next probability, your sweet son pissing into the rose bush in the middle
of your fear, your sentence, his kidneys spilling blood, tiny red ants clinging,
climbing the ice of these ribs in the smelt middle of the night’s middle warrant.
Who you are means nothing when archive libraries are burning down inside you.
Bio
Former 12 year Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America, Elena Karina Byrne is a freelance teacher, editor, collage artist, Poetry Consultant / Moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, a Contributing Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, a reviewer for ForeWord's Clarion Reviews, Literary Programs Director for The Ruskin Art Club and the new Executive Director of AVK Arts. Her publications, among others, include, 2009 Pushcart Prize XXXIII Best of the Small Presses, Best American Poetry 2005, The Yale Review, The Paris Review, APR, TriQuarterly, Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, The Journal, Colorado Review, Barrow Street, Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Verse, Drunken Boat, and Volt . Her books include: The Flammable Bird , (Zoo Press /Tupelo Press 2002), MASQUE (Tupelo Press, 2008) and the forthcoming Accomplice (Tupelo Press, 2012), and Voyeur Hour: Poetry, Art and Desire (essays, Tupelo Press, 2013).