Where Are They Now, Unwilling Friends
What visions do they see in Siberian snow-storms?
What hallucinations in the circle of the moon?
—Anna Akhmatova, from Requiem, Dedication
The swans are angry, their beating wingtips studded in ice
for rust leaks from the heart, bleeds
outward from the skin,
the putrid ring opening
like a mouth in the sky—
The last dandelion seeds blow from heaven, a dead field of stalks
pock mark where the sky
was immunized
against the earth
Scales fall from the blind white eye of the sun—what can it see
through the frenzy of its own scales falling?
a moth-eaten hole in the wool
blanket we stretch to
cover our shivering
The innards torn loose and thrown to the wind, skins
not sent to be burned, but resold, sewn for a new
body, animal with black glass eyes
I will trade you this quarter
for that quarter
Or nail clippings of the dead, yellowed and blunt
against our up-turned faces
for the scars on her face
told a far different story, the scars
on her scalp, concealed beneath hair
Who dares scratch the porcelain face, its rashed skin
flaking off in bit, white chips, a downpour of scab
her face veiled in a lace
embroidered with black dragonflies
So cold, so cold, they arrive with white teeth shining
“I remember you from the ocean,” I cry out, which makes them laugh
I was only a child then, and the white birds wheeled over the icy sea
occluded mother-of-pearl
button, unfastened
thing languishing
in dark pleats
No room, no room. Shout into the sky and your voice
taken by its static grid, pulled like a coarse wool from your throat
The color in a glass marble
ribbons from the core—
as the iris of an eye rises too
in folds, ruffle of charged blue
that cloaks a pinpoint aperture
(the color inside unreachable except some long glass needle
draw out, extract the fascination—)
within the head, a crank to be
wound, for the regimented music
must play, for the teeth in the cylinder
grate against the metal tines
and a melody, memory, emerges
What collision spilled the dust of you, unhinged your mahogany urn?
White ash, as if clean; gray ash, as if old
An apprentice drew the contour map
with charcoal
When he stopped asking for me, my name became syllables
of uncharged sound that fell from each other unattracted and cold,
scales of butterfly wings napkined from a spider’s lips
for his smudged thumbprint
makes him anyone, makes him
me, botched
record of indivisibility turned
invisibility
Sublimation Attempt
—though in the swathe
of black magnolia we had drifted
up, up, away from the sod, up
the silken whip of scent,
the labyrinth of gardens
receding below, corroded
etching—and climbed
and rose—oh, even past
the honeysuckle drench,
a balm, a drowsy
soporific for the earthly,
but for the waking,
a buoyancy, the medium
for floating up with
flutter-kick, with wings—
And then the inaudible song
begins again, below,
(munch, an underbreath
of grass-eaters)—
Like the finest probe,
it arrives, an invisible
line of metal, asking
where the black frame of sky
tilts askew,
where inchlings of day
leak through: the fume
of too many molecules.
The visible rot,
a harvest of organs—
So dawn interrupts,
for the light returns us
abrupt to dust, leaves us
embers for the ground:
to settle back
to ashen, our core
cooled, shedding inevitable
degrees, for the dirt
bleeds from us
our feverish heat, our
capacity to pass
through matter, call it the
sublime—to evaporate
in wisps, or limb out into
bark, or fester to a hiss, no,
co-conspirator of disappear, I
missed again. I missed.
Oni Buchanan is the author of What Animal and is on the piano faculty at the New School of Music in Cambridge. She maintains a private teaching studio, and serves as an online poetry mentor for the Anna Akhmatova Foundation.
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