Burt - Advice from the lights: poems

Graywolf Press Copyright 2017 by Stephen Burt The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law.

If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks. Published by Graywolf Press 250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600 Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401 All rights reserved. www.graywolfpress.org Published in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-55597-789-4 Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-981-2 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 First Graywolf Printing, 2017 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930116 Cover design: Kapo Ng Cover art: Shutterstock to Cooper and Nathan and Jessie for our present and our future I grew up in the human world, September said crossly.

Its not the same, Hawthorn sighed. You dont know what its like to always, always feel that you dont belong, to your family, to your city, or your school, knowing theres something different about you, something off, that youre not like the others, that youre an alien all alone. September crossed her arms. Hawthorn. Everyone feels like that. Catherynne M.

Valente, The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home I felt entirely connected to the time and place in which I was writing the songs, and so believed that those around me would feel the same as me and would understand them. Tracey Thorn, Bedsit Disco Queen She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway Nothing is everything to everyone. That is, compromises will have to be made.

Bryan Walpert, Native Bird

Everybody wants a piece of me. I have been weighed and measured, tested and standardized, throughout my young life. It happens to everyone, or to everyone with my ability. Now I live quietly and mostly in the dark, amid sawdust and sheer or streaky wooden surfaces. My role, when I reach maturity, may be to help people behave more sociably, and reduce the irritations of summer, or else to make it easier to eat. For reasons I cannot fathom, I weep when it rains.

My handlers keep me wrapped in awkward cloth. They will not let me touch my friends or show any curves. They have taught me how to shave. A few twigs and dragonfly wings got caught near the center of me long ago; they serve to distinguish me from others of my kind, along with some bubbles of air. I am worth more when I am clear. When I am most desirable you should be able to see yourself through me.

Some of my distant relatives will probably never go far, because they are too irregular, or opaque. Many of us will end on a cart. I, on the other hand, have had my work cut out for me by so many gloves and tongs, pallets and barges, poles and planks that I am sure I will go to New York; there people who own the rights to me will give elaborate thanks to one another, and go on to take me apart.

I was Mr. Spock being raised by Dr. Spock.

I was told I was free, but only free to be me. I knew I loved my digital clock. I would have trusted my instincts if I had any, or if I could have given them a name. I was deceived by the body that I mistook for a bad penny, by the shimmery beauty of my immediate peers, which I mistook for fame. By wearing them over and over without socks I let my one pair of gold tennis shoes fall apart. I regarded the temporary reassembly of the Styrofoam packing parts that came with small household appliances as a fine art.

Inhabited by C-3POs, they became starbases, or soft-focus all-white homes of the future. I wanted to think that they had nothing to fear. I ate peanut butter and pimento sandwiches every day for at least a week, at most, for half a year. I had become convinced that character was fate. Almost anything could result in tears. I wanted to stay at Alisons house overnight and wake up as a new girl, or a new mutant, or a new kind of humanity, engineered to travel at more than half the speed of light, but I wasnt allowed.

My bedtime and I were both eight.

That shell is pretty, but that shell is too small for me. Each home is a hideout; each home is a secret; each home is a getaway under the same hot lamp, a means to a lateral move at low velocity. I live in a room in the room of a boy I barely see. Sometimes the boy and his talkative friends raise too-warm hands and try to set me free and I retreat into myself, hoping they place me back in my terrarium, and they do, with disappointed alacrity. Scatter patterns in sand, adnates, cancellates, gaping whelk husks, a toy tractor-trailer, cracked and dinged, beside the spine of a plastic tree, the helmet-shaped shelter of a shadow cast by a not-quite-buried wedge of pottery if I have a body thats wholly my own then it isnt mine.

For a while I was protected by what I pretended to be.

To be delicate, to be too big for the helpless, too little and too important To have to say: help me out of this tulle dress I know how to kiss but not how to do this slow dance What use is the adult world? It doesnt have unicorns Why cant I wear two different colored shoes? I can remember when I wanted X more than anything everfor X fill in from your own childhood [balloon, pencil lead, trading card, shoelaces, a bow or not to have to wear a bow] and now I am moved to action, when I am moved, principally by a memory of what to want. The point is to be, in your own eyes, what you are, or to keep your own tools, so that you can pretend. And so it was no surprise, to me at least, when Cooper, who is two, collapsed in fortissimo fits when he could not have a $20, three-foot-long stuffed frog in the image of Frog from Frog and Toad , since he is Toad. That morning, needing a nap, he had thrown, from the third-story balcony of Millers Cafe and Bakery, into the whistling rapids and shallows of the Ammonoosuc River, with its arrowheads and caravans of stones, his Red Sox cap. His hair was shining like another planets second sun, as he explained, looking up, I threw my hat in the river.