Green Linden Press

Festina Lente

—after Susan Stewart

You must lie down now, for it is you who are vanishing,
not the forest. (It will remain here long after you’re gone.)
Festina lente, hurry slowly, as if stalking a hen,
one you must catch from behind and hold tightly,
or it will run, thinking you a wolf, and not to be

returned home, to the coop, the hen startled to find herself alive.
You should sit down now, for it is you who are vanishing
at the writing desk set with your mother’s brass candlesticks.
Festina lente, hurry slowly, as if stalking a hen.
Take in everything as if for the last time, your smell heightened,

for it is the sense of things invisible approaching, come to inhabit you for a time,
returned home, to the coop, the hen startled to find herself alive,
in spite of disfigurement, the halo of innocence that scourged you still shining.
At the writing desk, set with your mother’s brass candlesticks,
you will find yourself—not the life you imagined but the beauty that lived you—

skin powdered white with ashes cupped in a gold compact
of things invisible approaching, come to inhabit you for a time,
the yes and the no, the gurry and the gambol, held equally,
in spite of disfigurement, the halo of innocence that scourged you still shining.
You should lie down now in a field of narcissus,

a queen of Hades, your bodice left open for the dead,
skin powdered white with ashes cupped in a gold compact
their mysterium strangering in you, impregnating you for a time
the yes and the no, the gurry and the gambol, held equally—
as if you, yourself, were the only one who really knew how to hold you,

the truth of life always seen in arrears, in dusk’s flat light,
a queen of Hades, your bodice left open for the dead
who suckle a blue runnel from your breasts, their colostrum,
their mysterium strangering in you, impregnating you for a time,
startled to return home, to the coop, still alive in the quickening.

Difficult Body

There is a time when you can no longer say, my God.
                                  —Carlos Drummond de Andrade

There is a time, in the mind, when the soul slips
from its cerement and goes to live like a fruit bat in the rafters,
flying through the ether like no real bird, knowing no bounds,

and, fey little wanderer that it is, watches from above—
as in a surgical theater—the bodies of all things being born into this world
under a sign of error,
of negation, as they are being erased.  

*
Inhibited in their aims, the emotional impulses
torque into aberration, divide and multiply
like cells seeking a new host.

You could be eighteen again, watching your stand-in, your stunt double—
a sherbet Frankenstein in waitress uniform, serving pancakes
and pots of hot coffee, smiling for the customer,
but inside, you burned like a fire shut in stone.

How could you help
but become magma, enigma?

When did it come, the split, the Others,
the voice asking, What of your shining body revealed?
It was only a matter of time
before your psyche separated from the body
like a blister.

*
It is then that the soul returned to the heyday of childhood,
its boneyard of linoleum
speckled like an oyster catcher’s egg—
that reliquary of slide rules and dead languages,
pink sugar cubes soaked in vaccine,
Our Lady of Good Counsel,
where the hard discipline of the Sisters
tried to forge you into God’s Marine.

*
You clapped erasers and cleaned chalkboards, incensed yourself
in the amber gris of chalk, in a talcum of smoke, cocooned, you thought,
in a happy childhood, until you were told that you don’t remember.

*
It hadn’t happened yet, the disaster’s fallout like manna or ground
pumice or gray flotsam. You simply practiced the drills,
filing past the Glass Wax stencils of snowflakes and bulletin boards,

*
drinking the milk of amnesia, crouching under wooden desks,
memorizing the cadence of your own diaphragm rising and falling,
anklets neatly tucked under the buttocks,

*
back curled like unshelled shrimp—all that abundance of pink flesh—
presexual—so vulnerable that the predator wanted to mar it,
gelid and available, steal its energy, capture it for his own private use,

*
the soul’s little light doused out for the air raid.

Lise Goett’s second book, Leprosarium (Tupelo Press, 2018), was a selection in the July 2015 Open Reading Period of Tupelo Press and the 2012 winner of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award in Poetry from the Poetry Society of America. Her other awards include the Palette Spotlight Award, The Paris Review Discovery Award, and The Barnard New Women Poets Prize for her first poetry collection, Waiting for the Paraclete (Beacon, 2002).

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2020