Marie Anne Arreola
I want to make sense of it all— this semantic shift,
this tilting world of language and flesh,
my hands in the dirt, knuckled deep,
caked and bleeding, digging
as if meaning could be unearthed,
as if the small bird bodies
I uncover, hollow-boned,
could explain the wreck of things,
how to clear the wetness,
how to bring light back to ground,
exposure becoming its own ceremony:
naked, immodest, the raw striations of earth
pocked with evidence of my passing,
and I’m creating from disposition,
from the aftermath, sweeping the ruins
into trash bags or leaf piles
or paper boxes,
their corners soft with rain,
feeding from destruction,
thriving on the bare slate of something
newly birthed, keening, half-alive,
its mouth opening toward sky.
I am curled at the bottom
of a champagne flute,
glass walls narrowing above me,
speared through like a cocktail olive,
my slick green body caught between
celebration and aftermath,
straining gin from my underwear
in the July heat, breathing through
the little blue cloud of his evaporation
because he left me in the rubble:
a handful of collar stays,
the smell of starch and loss,
his shirts still holding the shape
of his shoulders— and I hear his voice
dryly muttering from the closet walls
as I peel him off me, strip away his syntax,
his grammar of possession,
because he wanted something young and wise,
an instrument with handsome strings,
but I’m no longer an instrument.
I’m the music that refuses to end,
that keeps playing in empty rooms.
We will brake, as in a river brake,
a tangle of life where the current slows,
as in the archaeological kind,
worth excavating, worth sifting through
with careful hands, not as in stopping
but as in transforming motion into memory,
velocity into sediment.
The laws of physics
promise energy cannot be destroyed—
only changed, matter collapsing
into other matter; atoms shifting
but remaining themselves,
faithful to their own small orbits,
and we are more complex than that,
more reckless in our undoing,
because when we disaster
we disaster completely,
we erupt and consume,
burn through our entire systems of meaning,
leave ash where language used to live,
and we name it fire ecology, sinkhole,
tornado, tsunami, avalanche,
we name it epidemic, oil spill,
meltdown, we name it love,
each catastrophe its own form of worship,
each ruin a god chained
to what it once destroyed,
still burning in the wreckage,
and yet after it’s done
we come back—to mitochondria,
to seed germination,
to the patient work of moss
splitting stone.
We rebuild through glass,
through the geometry of crystals,
through bees and their quiet golden industry,
and the original meaning of disaster
is an unfavorable planet, a failed star,
even language mourns its orbit,
even words remember their falling.
I’d lend you my back—the unblossomed part,
the skin still soft enough to bear your weight,
but I wouldn’t take your back in return
because that pain isn’t simple,
isn’t just red and tender,
there’s a pain in telling you why
I don’t want to understand it all—
only how the body transforms
from good to bad to too bad, slowly,
in the middle of loving you,
in the middle of the night,
in the middle of life,
how it happens cell by cell,
how it happens like moss,
and who can speak tenderly
about the end, about how we tend
to the dying—like sheep, like sleepwalking,
like pulling weeds from a garden
we’ll never see bloom, and I’m sorry
for the world, I’m sorry for everything
that is not tender, for the shape of love
that grew into a tumor,
a geometry that devours tenderness
and calls it devotion, and the body
keeps building around it, endlessly,
like crystals in a cave no one will enter.
God, if she exists,
is your mother pounding on the door—
Wake up, wake up, we’re late!
and she’s fastening the top button
of your nicest shirt,
dragging a comb across
your scalp until it stings,
and God is the feeling of a collar
strangling you and the breathless scramble
to the car and the smallness of being
herded into church halfway through the sermon.
God is the moment you try
to disappear and fail,
the moment you realize
you were never invisible
to begin with,
that you’ve been
building yourself,
slowly,
into something seen,
and green, and grinned,
and flavored.