selections from Days

 

 

and then you want to FaceTime, pour your life into one on screen, you are in a room too

large to hide everyone’s vocabulary sizzling away, something shredding when we talk,

rounding, river, mull, kind of thing, standstills of mouths, another wrong impression,

pushing, white bleeding squeezed into tusk-clean apertures, such compulsions as the

need to violently fade, go poof, masquerade invisibly like space or power, where a mask

of air punctures, as that gossamer would, but then there is also the need to puff, to spill

out onto surfaces, smear volumetric spheres of one’s body, ladle out onto lawns, over

 

an armchair, onto the ottoman, over the TV, through the carpets, onto someone else’s

presence, onto the cup of their beautiful hand, their care, the little rivulet of their need,

the dent they need filling, somewhere in the background of sentiment narrowed to

irrelevance, she said, in other people’s gardens, worn, sky, a tad overcast, cloud, glue,

one to another, after is before, progeny of lisps, joint prosody to make rubber odes,

something is being blown out, you’re doing the trope thing again, you’re following a line,

red herring, tape, footsteps, something being diminished, traps you can hear, something

 

thrust into its own stillness, something about remaining alert, something about not

standing on the yellow line, something self-capitalizing, something residual on top,

something sagging in waterholes, shuddering on a broken fluorescent corner, pillaging

veins in an open field, dumb and leather, resurfacing, pouring a tunnel, but if flowering

were there, what’s clipped, nounless, coagulating light, stalking a series of unspecified

dead ends, pressed into nubs of atmosphere, touch someone else’s inhalation, I’m

sitting on a feeling as if sitting on a chandelier, iffy, hunger is sticky, I touch you like

 

an object that disappears into the sound of tearing, I touch you like a hill in midnight

I’d escaped, hours packed round your hair, a hand, give it to night just once, tomorrow,

nettle path, thin stone, bees empty of time touching consonants, grooves that unfold,

syllable by syllable taken off into grass shadows, crystal on foghorn, the life I read,

make your place in the faces of others, cold but erotic, speaking into your hand that

is not a telescope, and we know where we’re going, or where we should go and then

we are everywhere, blurs, permanent as matter, writing at the computer, to become

 

grammarians of sweet Amyctis’ body, I am full, feeling full, features on sun, moon has

more features actually, sneers, or as if about to sneeze or keen, salt and pepper, eyes

without pupils, no eyeballs, just smudges like turf mounds seen in the distance like

thongs, crying patches, all the ways in which nature is animal, nature is human, and

then swallows the human, absorbs it like its own blood, poor or rich, all of us roaming in

our clothes like divots, like bumps with mirrors coming out of them, and the moon is a

trickle of light and there is no grief on it, that was just an image, flash in the pan, skinny,

 

poking through a piece of cloud and the cloud smudges the light like a snail trail, in the

morning, the snails got over everything, snails of light, light, light, I was too shy to speak

in front of the crowd, my friend got bored with me, wouldn’t speak to me, I am bullish

change, she thinks to herself, triplets of weeds, she exfoliates, flip-flopping traffic of lips,

this bruise on paper, brand new soap, I think it’s vegetarian, made of pears, I circle

around, or back, this flag that could smother you if you’re not careful, dragonfly landing

on your eyelashes, sun, sun, so much sun, then blue to dark again until the sun comes

 

: :

 

These excerpts from Days by Simone Kearney appear with the permission of the publisher, Belladona* (Brooklyn, NY). Earlier versions of some of these sections appeared in Boston Review in 2013. About the work, Fanny Howe says, “The poet who experiences drama in self-reflection, who feels increasing dread and particularity, separation as abandonment and then specifically wonder. She enters the magnificent temple of the given world. She could be Simone Weil with no notebook or Lyn Hejinian as an orphan with no past. The ugly thing is man-made-in-America. She could almost be in an ER with only her thoughts to survive on.  Her verses begin short and swift, then lengthen and almost repeat. That dreaded loop! But she jumps off. Very bare and undefended, she still knows what it is to lay down her life (and herself) for an imperative of her own making.”