@strawberrytaeger
i'm on the bathroom floor again,
and breathing is hard,
and eating's been hard, and sleeping,
the world is a laden thing
rolling around on my chest lately.
just being alive is heavy tonight,
but we have enough dead friends.
how long do you think we can sit here
before we have to move?
there was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it. ✦
adam wakes up, probes his side. rib gone, wound sticky. god's fingers have touched a place that will never be touched again. how does adam not curl up, swell and fall, beg god to touch him again. to touch him everywhere else. not just ribs but cheek, inner thigh, lap. the worst part of the side-wound is not that god penetrated you but that he won't do it again
come here, stay with me, stroke me by the hair
'cause i would give anything, anything, to have you as my man
i'm waiting
i'm waiting
i'm waiting
it's filthy
disgusting
so ugly i'm sure
i'm ugly
disgusting
and filthy for sure
but there was a time once
i'll stay in the pool and drown
so i don't have to watch you leave
you were born, you had body, you died.
it is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.
II
nineteenth century critics mocked painters who cast shadows
in unexpected colors. after noticing green cypresses do drop red
shadows, goethe chastised them. “the eye demands
completeness and seeks to eke out the colorific circle in itself.”
he tells of a trick of light that had him pacing a row of poppies
to see the flaming petals again and figure out why.
over and over again wittgenstein frets the problem of translucence.
why is there no clear white?
he wants to see the world through white-tinted glasses,
but all he finds is mist.
at first i felt as if the baby had fallen away
like a blue shadow on the snow.
then i felt like i killed the baby
in the way you can be thinking about something else
and drop a heavy platter by mistake.
sometimes i feel like i was stupid
to have thought i was pregnant at all.
once when i went into those woods i saw a single hot pink orchid
on the hillside and i had to keep reminding myself not to
tell the baby about the beautiful small things i was seeing.
so, hot pink has been here forever and i don’t even care
about that color or how andy warhol showed me an orchid.
i hate pink. it makes my eyes burn.
I
i want to believe the eye doesn’t see green until it has a name,
because i don’t want anything to look the way it did before.
van gogh painted pink flowers, but the pink faded
and curators labeled the work “white roses” by mistake.
the world in my window is a color the Greeks called chlorol.
when i learned the word i was newly pregnant
and the first pale lichens had just speckled the silver branches.
the pines and the lichens in the chill drizzle were glowing green
and a book in my lap said chlorol was one of the untranslatable
words. the vibrating glow pleased me then, as a finger
dipped in sugar pleased me then. i said the word aloud
for the baby to hear. chlorol. i imagined the baby
could only see hot pink and crimson inside its tiny universe,
but if you can see what i’m seeing, the word for it
is chlorol. It’s one of the things you’ll like out here.