4 poems by Rebecca Seiferle

 

xxiii.

 

if you sit by me

I won’t be able to hear the words

 

for listening to

your body. . .

.

xxv.

 

. . .the healing

of the blossoms

 

is a red spiking

air

 

opening to the tongues

of hummingbirds

 

aloe

alone

 

a. . .

.

xxxi.

 

no Virgil, nonetheless she means to guide me as if I were her

Dante “to visit each nexus of power,”

 

as if all that mattered were power, the way even thresholds to hell

pulse quasars or anti-matter,

and I’ve seen this before, how a tourist will place stones

on an altar, hoping anything, even an exotic devil, will follow her home,

 

like that day in Vilnius,

at the chapel of the black Madonna

 

in the arch

of the city gates, how in the street below, I looked up and could see

 

the icon glittering

through the window, and having thought, nonchalantly, of taking the steps

 

up to view her golden face

of the forced conversion, felt so dizzy, it was as if I stood

 

on a wobbly axis

of some rotating crazily

 

paranoiac heaven and earth, and so said, no, no, I’m not going,

you’ll have to go alone,

 

and so she went on alone, to return, an hour later, as I was drifting

through sea glass and amber,

 

to say the first thing

she’d met upon entering

 

was a corpse

laid out upon a table.

 

So at this moment, years later in the burning sun,

when this other woman wants me to

 

come closer, urging me to enter another shrine

which is just a burnt wall, the one wall left standing

 

of an ancient house,

red brick arches and

 

three foot high iron wrought crosses,

novena candles with their nine days of wax,

 

an altar in the center

draped with a flower arrangement, withering lilies,

 

festering grass, I can’t go any closer. The truth is

I am sick of this story, the earth covered with wax

 

from so many angers

burning themselves down to nothing,

 

I’m afraid it’s a sign of you and me, how in this world all desire

has to become a corpse or a guttered ruin,

 

it’s the shrine of the dead lovers,

she tells me.

.

…….

~. xxv

 

 

. . .the body turns in the ground, in a can of worms, food

for worms in the can of language,

 

the body thinks it should not be dead, not yet, not while

it feels the wetness between its legs,

 

not while its lips mouth open

feeling another’s lips,

 

not with its arms and shoulders burning, not like this,

not yet, not while the heart trembles, hearing

 

the mind

quite resolute

 

with its shovels. . .

 

Rebecca Seiferle’s fourth poetry collection, Wild Tongue, (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) won the 2008 Grub Street National Poetry Prize. In 2004 she was awarded a Lannan Foundation Fellowship. She is also a noted translator; Copper Canyon Press published her translation of Vallejo’s The Black Heralds in 2003. In 2012, she was named Tucson Poet Laureate.