Poetry |

“Lacryma Christi” and “De Rerum Natura”

Lacryma Christi

 

What you meant by hit me harder, I see now, was don’t hurt me.

I do things manually because technology takes too long to learn.

 

What has the will to beauty not made uglier?

How far is too far from the moon?

 

Take ostrich plumage.  Take space suits.

Take the decade I spent in a capella choirs,

 

making me a stranger to instrumentation.

Memory, get off your high horse.

 

Mea culpa, mea culpa:

no one belongs to anyone, I know.

 

Is any art even possible at this elevation,

whereat love draws the line at torment?

 

When you left this country for another country,

I blackened out the days of your absence

 

on my calendar and religiously ate the food

native to the place where you were.  There is no difference

 

between osmosis and willpower, smaller difference

still between magical thinking and the real.

 

Just throw me a bone, I remember thinking.

It’s horrible how the mouth keeps making

 

shapes after the sound is gone.

If you substitute the word happiness

 

for the word sadness, nothing changes.

And then it occurs to me, I have never loved anyone.

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

De Rerum Natura

 

Eventually, an authentic feeling passed

between us. One of defeat.

I have a high tolerance for tedium:

those, too, serve who only stand and wait.

My fortune cookie reads:  soon, a guest will delight you

but a flower is the most anticipated thing on earth.

Unlucky reader, if we did not go about

our burying, what would become of us?

When I sleep, I sleep dreamless as a baby.

When I wake, like a baby I am naked, alone and afraid.

An opinion is private property. Therefore, I will go without.

Our relationship was a living thing.

But when I hacked at it, there was no blood.

Being mesmerized is the last thing I remember:

the hypnotic sway of ancient money trees.

Now, after you, I embark upon a maiden voyage

and will not return until my hair is long and white.

Like me, the invasive plant grows wild and free.

Groping always toward the story,

the composition, the light.

Contributor
Virginia Konchan

Virginia Konchan is the author of two poetry collections, Any God Will Do (Carnegie Mellon, 2020) and The End of Spectacle (Carnegie Mellon, 2018), a collection of short stories, Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press, 2017), and three chapbooks, including Empire of Dirt (above/ground press, 2019). Her poetry has appeared in The New YorkerThe New RepublicBoston Review, and elsewhere.

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