The heart's mud-colored fears sleek out like the many limbs
Of the octopus, floating in his pool of ink and highly
Calibrated intellect, his arms the rolling rs of a beautiful dead language
Ululating in the water salt, ready to grasp onto any free-floating
Terror, dexterous as a mind as it comes undone.
Did you really just say "ululate"?
Who is it, Miss Bliss, that you think you are.
A slut of queasy lays on the easy white laid page.
The sweetesse of the ingenue who lay down in dampened leaves
Blazing scarlet still in the sepia of early photographs--you,
Here, in the Victorian nightgown bought on Portobello Road, lay back
On the great snarled trunk of sycamore, knowing even more
Than you knew you knew, still
With all the earthy powers of this world. The September cattails
Open, billowing out their minks and power to procreate, you,
Fertile just like that, comely, untouchable,
As more than a handful of gentlemen had told you: a hummingbird
Just out of reach. You do go on.
If you are out of sight of him, i.e., if he is in the next room,
The next world, he is dead; you're sure of it.
In the kitchen, the mother's handheld meat grinder mincing tongue
Like earthworms squiggling pinkly
Into a speckled bowl. It will reappear
In a toasted sandwich which will never touch your lips.
In Tikrit, one man holds on to his egg that lays hens.
The surrealist is festooned in the orange jumpsuit of Guantanamo.
It is likely we will be punished soon, for having known of bliss, Miss Bliss.
Who would want to fuck you now.
I am afraid that in the one white room just one white room from here,
He will be dying before I get back home.
I would not live with that. I was alive
When Obama was our president, witnessing
His lanky hand laid across Mr. Lincoln's Bible, bound
In burgundy, gilded heavily, transfixable, austere though in its decadence.
A brief history of a little hope. We have squandered such a grace.
The poppa in his attic darkroom, working only by red light, coaxing
The invisible out from its page. For me, of fear--
The problem is that Possibility is not distinguishable
From the Actual. And here it is--the photograph
Of the sisters all in snowscape, all in wool and early fox-fur hats.
One of them, cheeky, peeking through the black-slatted fence, smiling.
All memory is loss.
-Lucie Brock-Broido
