The Throne

When I was afraid, fear took me in,
and gave me a cold seat in her kingdom
from which I looked for all my kin
and found no mother, no father. Dumb
I was, and deaf then, Touch only I had,
only the cold claws of the arm chairs did
I feel, and hollowness in my head.
My mother was dead. My father was dead.
I gripped the throne of fear with my right hand,
and the seat of the chair held me upright
or I would have fallen. I couldn't stand.
But the throne's left arm was warm with human might.
It took my hand and held me in its own,
that the kingdom of fear might be overthrown.

--Molly Peacock

Pink Paperclip [love this! relate to it!]

A pink plastic paperclip lies prone on
the counter, its curve-return-curve
out of reach of the dishcloth: I miss it
as I swipe the crumbs into the trash
with my ruthless urge to order.
My husband comes by, saying
"I've got a foster home for paperclips,"
and takes it to his room, to a little box
where it waits in readiness,
the color of a girl's barrette.
I might have chucked it,
and this is why the gods terrify me.
Yet they merely interest him, among all
the other beings in the world, including me,
whom he still finds useful,
even inspiring my new goal:
to personify everything,
each in the bloom of its use,
becoming a poet after all.

--Molly Peacock

More Than Me

There’s no other life inside you
after a miscarriage, technically.
The body is slow to register,
though, and mine holds on
to events I’ve come to associate
with bringing forth:
aversion to the singe of vinegar,
the tough of economy chuck;
noontime stomach flutters;
sleep so thick as to defy
dreams almost completely.
This doesn’t throw me.

What does: your right hand
over my uterus that night
we laid, hands clasping,
in the nursery, after everything.
How my whole circuitry,
beneath your touch, teemed
with the force of 6 million crickets.

Yesterday, working from home,
I wrote you from the rocking chair:
“I wonder what things look like
inside me right now.”
I sat there, my own hands
pressing the good, soft skin
of my belly, my blood coursing
hard, vigorous as love.
Coursing through disassembly,
coursing toward ready.

--me

The Cliffs of Mistake

To know you’re making a mistake as
you make it, yet not be able to stop,
is to step off a cliff, expecting to scramble
backwards and up through the air to stand
on the outcrop you stepped from,
even though it can’t unhappen as you
backpedal wildly with the second step,
looking far, far below onto the moraine
of pain you anticipate later, which is now
only the shock of recognizing the result
there’s no leaping back from.
Oh God, and this is only a metaphor.
Might this be what metaphors are for?
To say what it’s like before you hit what it is.

--Molly Peacock

Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah

My mother scraped the name Patricia Ann from the ruins
of her discarded Delta, thinking it would offer me shield
and shelter, that leering men would skulk away at the slap
of it. Her hands on the hips of Alabama, she went for flat
and functional, then siphoned each syllable of drama,
repeatedly crushing it with her broad, practical tongue
until it sounded like an instruction to God and not a name.
She wanted a child of pressed head and knocking knees,
a trip-up in the doubledutch swing, a starched pinafore
and peppermint-in-the-sour pickle kinda child, stiff-laced
and unshakably fixed on salvation. Her Patricia Ann
would never idly throat the Lord’s name or wear one
of those thin, sparkled skirts that flirted with her knees.
She'd be a nurse or a third-grade teacher or a postal drone,

jobs requiring alarm clock discipline and sensible shoes.
My four downbeats were music enough for a vapid life
of butcher shop sawdust and fatback as cuisine, for Raid
spritzed into the writhing pockets of a Murphy bed.
No crinkled consonants or muted hiss would summon me.

My daddy detested borders. One look at my mother's
watery belly, and he insisted, as much as he could insist
with her, on the name Jimi Savannah, seeking to bless me
with the blues-bathed moniker of a ball breaker, the name
of a grown gal in a snug red sheath and unlaced All-Stars.
He wanted to shoot muscle through whatever I was called,
arm each syllable with tiny weaponry so no one would
mistake me for anything other than a tricky whisperer
with a switchblade in my shoe. I was bound to be all legs,
a bladed debutante hooked on Lucky Strikes and sugar.
When I sent up prayers, God's boy would giggle and consider.

Daddy didn't want me to be anybody's sure-fire factory,
nobody's callback or seized rhythm, so he conjured
a name so odd and hot even a boy could claim it. And yes,
he was prepared for the look my mother gave him when
he first mouthed his choice, the look that said, That's it,
you done lost your goddamned mind. She did that thing
she does where she grows two full inches with righteous,
and he decided to just whisper Love you, Jimi Savannah
whenever we were alone, re- and rechristening me the seed
of Otis, conjuring his own religion and naming it me.

--Patricia Smith

Lapsarian

This bit-open earth.
Arbor: in the neigh of branches.
The shallow night, merging
with noon.

I speak to you
of the word that mires in the smell
of here-after.
I speak to you of the fruit
I shoveled up
from below.
I speak to you of speech.

Humus colors. Buried in the rift
till human. The day's prismatic blessing--divisible
by breath. Starling paths,
snake furrows, seeds. What burns
is banished.
Is taken with you.
Is yours.

A man
walks out from the voice
that became me.
He has vanished.
He has eaten
the ripening word
that killed you and
killed you.

He has found himself,
standing in the place
where the eye most terribly holds
its ground.

--Paul Auster (who knew he was a poet, too?)

Hence Poetry

"The eye sees the world in flux. The word is an attempt to arrest the flow, to stabilize it. And yet we persist in trying to translate experience into language. Hence poetry, hence the utterances of daily life. This is the faith that prevents universal despair--and also causes it." --Paul Auster