Chessy Normile
Untitled
Little ice ages
cracking open in the dark
like wine kept
in the furthest corner
of a wooden cabinet
where dimness gathers
and erects itself softly—
what was I talking about?
Wine. No, ice ages,
opening like a cork
pulled up and popped out
from the center of the earth—what?
I don’t know what I mean.
I just want to write a poem
about the cold chain of being
clicking apart, a regular Magellan
slapping open the sea.
You are crying literally
over spilled milk—
something warm
on a cold and masculine boat.
Who can blame you?
Time to ice your bruises,
turn the purple surface over.
I once met a man
very boastful at the bar
but unable to exert
his masculinity
without a witness.
Alone, he grew shy
and scared of my friend and me.
All three of us slept in her twin bed
after he gave up trying to have sex with us.
In the morning at Bagel World
his ego returned, however,
directly over the cream cheese counter,
and suddenly he was
a regular dumbbell.
May he find peace today.
Two squirrels wrestling
fall off the roof
where the sky opens one way
and warms four enclosed trees
the other. Nothing matters so much—
the ducks revel lightly, cannons blast
on the computer, the grass
cuts itself open, I perform
campy blow jobs by the river,
everybody is wearing orange again.
This isn’t the end.
You’re still speaking
and I can hear you.
It’s time to wake up.
The knights, embarrassed,
tripped over the infantry
and plunged into the stream.
The peasants they had come
to exterminate speared them
like fish and then hung
their gold spurs
on the wall
of the local church.
It is 9 AM
you’re thirty-three,
time to die
publicly.
Jesus, I believe
you were a good man,
but this is dependent on my belief
that what you’d find today in Christianity
you’d spend the rest of your life
trying to lose. Grapes,
clementines,
pears cast
in a lizard green
shadow,
all collected
in a low
wooden bowl.
The trapdoor snaps open
and you’re just a hat now and space.
In the fourteenth century doctors
were identifiable in a crowd
by their red robes
and purple ermine trim.
In a crowd I’m identifiable
because I’m crying.
But it’s not supposed
to be about me at all.
It doesn’t matter
if I wake or sleep.
If I am a trap
or a trapdoor.
There are little red bugs
almost invisible
making patterns on the steps outside the church.
Gold spurs glint in the light
through the red window.
We are thinking about ice
getting so dense and cold
it turns blue. We are thinking
about a dress
terraforming around the body of the planet,
about a winter so loud
you turn the snow up
inside your face.
Although you are
pressing yellow pollen
into the palm of my hand
that does not make me a hornet,
decapitating every third thought
to carry its body back to myself.
I am washing my face—
what if that mattered?
But it doesn’t.
You can’t take it with you.
Whatever you pick up in the dungeon
you must put down in the hall.
Even, or especially, longing.
When my longing has a subject
that’s like fitting a waterfall
inside of a small balloon.
Do not throw
that balloon
at anybody.
When my longing
lacks a subject
that’s a wider thing
and more words
feel right. For instance,
flip-flop,
jackknife,
the blood inside a bell,
ferns buried
in dark water—
all this names it.
But you . . .
When I look
for your word
a small bone
gets caught
in my throat.
In the kitchen you show me
a dense, round loaf of bread
and demonstrate how in 1350
someone would’ve hidden it in his hat.
There is no word
for this demonstration.