All Night, I Dream of Prisons
Bless the cloud that blessed the sun and hid it
from my anger, my red face. In the sometimes broad and often pressed
so tight that nothing can squeeze through container of my mind, love exists. So, too,
there are flashes of a red so pure it is my only access to a first red, an ether
red, Plato’s red, Plath’s red headband
torn from her head by Hughes at the party where, in my head, they meet, they meet
again, it’s a beautiful dim-lit
place, and sometimes jazz plays, a riot of forms
gone wrong, I don’t even know, for Christ’s sake
what a cornet sounds like, or when Ornette Coleman lived
or played and maybe died—
bursts of red, the flap of a red-winged black-
bird, the upright strike of a proud salvia, Sylvia goes
where salvia grows, wherever I go, the same god
that has never called me to sing of him might even now be calling me
to sing of what I think is godlessness, but is instead
a crack of light—sweetie pie, there’s a little fetching keyhole in this
day, reminding you the severance you strike between your
self, that bundled hive, and the day is another lie, another method of survival
that will kill you in the end. Look in or out—there is a red so vast, each red
thing is a falling off, a fat vat of jewels to run
the sun through, an empty chalice dunked and filled with derivations
of this swell, nameless in its light. It’s light. I swear, I sing
of this, or I am silent.
I Will Blow This Poem Up
With a fire in the belly stitched from stars
who might, who knows, begin or end it, always
these decisions– earlier, I noted
the way speech is a line I draw
how the words creep
along, little wheeled trains, exhausted, the fat chuff
of my life. I wondered what that had to do
with that sad, bald, sexist fool trying to write
poems, trying to sleep with me & nearly every friend
I have who writes, I saw his sad apartment
lined in books, the Kama Sutra laid out & winking
on the coffee table, I wondered if he ever felt his words
go heavy in his mouth, fall out: silver coins
he pays those beauties, their lips like parting
sparrows, hair like braided wheat, they clasp his words
inside their open hands & warm them. They retreat. He unbinds
his lonely cock, unbidden, from
the trap his mouth has woven– god in god
in heaven– here are women and men bound like chain link
fences writing in a glory that never gives way–
the opulence!
the rubies in the palms!
the hidden cunts that thrust like cocks!–
for fuck’s sake, where is that poem I conjured
with that fat English woman’s
fat English novel speaking to me
from my lap?
Spring from your locked box!
Be the woman throwing light
upon the bodies.
Poem, you flay a trapped tapestried Marsyas
forever while a Countess snores; a servant catches a wink
of his anguished eye. You crawl inside
a jukebox & fetch me
downstairs to the bar
You are Roger Reeves in his skinny jeans, delicately
showing me, drink in hand, why I should give this hustle up–
You Lie
You Lie In A Split Atom of Detail
threads gleam like discs of fat pearl
laughter from a woman
still a girl
twirling husky smoke
from her throat– yellow silks
a spoiled whore
would flaunt–
There is a moat surrounds me, but listen, there are ways
to stick a pin in the cloaks we think confine us
from the next wide, frozen world: today, my son, barely
three, pointed to our discarded Christmas tree
which earlier wore an angel on its spindly top:
Next year, that tree will wear a star I pluck from the sky
he said, in all seriousness, at the start of this poem
Emily Van Duyne is assistant professor of writing at Stockton College and a 2009 graduate of the Solstice MFA in creative writing.