Klink - Raptus

Table of Contents

ALSO BY JOANNA KLINK

CIRCADIAN
THEY ARE SLEEPING

Some of these poems have appeared under different titles, in other forms. Wonder of Birds was printed as a chapbook by Hand Held Editions.

What Is (War) is reprinted from LONG JOURNEY : CONTEMPORARY NORTHWEST POETS, edited by David Biespiel (Oregon State University Press, 2006).

AT LENGTH Sorting, Wonder of Birds

BLACK WARRIOR REVIEW Junkyard

BOSTON REVIEW Wayfaring

CHICAGO REVIEW The Radiant

COLUMBIA: A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE & ART Safekeeping

DENVER QUARTERLY Paraphrase of Several Guesses, What Is (War)

GULF COAST Some Feel Rain

HARVARD DIVINITY BULLETIN The Graves

H.O.W. JOURNAL Aftermaths and Wish-clouds, Half Omen Half Hope

JUBILAT Poetry

MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW Raptus

OPEN CITY Lodestar

POETRY NORTHWEST My Enemy

Grateful acknowledgment to The University of Montana, Harvard University, and The MacDowell Colony.

To my family my love.

Ken White, thank you.

Thank you Paul Slovak, Prageeta Sharma, John DAgata, Lois Welch, Jerry Fetz, Honor Moore, Youna Kwak, Saul Melman, Dorothy Wang, Caroline Woolard, Leni Zumas, and Jonathan Farmer.

Raptus (1) A state of rapture or furor. Also: an instance of this; a fit of intense emotion. (2) A seizure; a sudden or acute attack (as in a raptus of the blood, Impulsive Raptus, or Raptus Nervorum). (3) From rapio: A carrying-off by force. (4) A state of spiritual rapture marked by anesthesia. (5) A pathological paroxysm of activity giving vent to impulse or tension (as in an act of violence).

Love the Worldand stay inside it.

Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems, III

Some feel rain. Some feel the beetle startle
in its ghost-part when the bark
slips. Some feel musk. Asleep against
each other in the whiskey dark, scarcely there.
When it falls apart, some feel the moondark air
drop its motes to the patch-thick slopes of
snow. Tiny blinkings of ice from the oak,
a boot-beat that comes and goes, the line of prayer
you can follow from the dusking wind to the snowy owl
it carries. Some feel sunlight
well up in blood-vessels below the skin
and wish there had been less to lose.
Knowing how it could have been, pale maples
drowsing like a second sleep above our temperaments.
Do I imagine there is any place so safe it cant be
snapped? Some feel the rivers shift,
blue veins through soil, as if the smokestacks were a long
dream of exhalation. The lynx lets its paws
skim the ground in snow and showers.
The wildflowers scatter in warm tints until
the second they are plucked. You can wait
to scrape the ankle-burrs, you can wait until Mercury
the early star underdraws the night and its blackest
districts. And wonder. Why others feel
through coal-thick night that deeply colored garnet
star. Why sparring and pins are all you have.
Why the earth cannot make its way towards you.

It left in the wind, it returned in the air.
I opened wide my door to it.

I shuttered all the rooms to block out
sunlight. It left at midnight.

It seemed to me there were birds
in that dark. I locked all the exits

it returned in the fissures, the errors,
the marooned sulking thoughts.

What in the meantime happened
was nothing. Requiring no company,

plummeted into its own blood
blackness. We were careless. It left

at the green summer of dawn.
Pulled us from a dreamno one

heard it. It gave every reason,
declared itself broken, gathered into

a cracked leather satchel its alarm clock
and books. I have come to tell you

there are no new stars. If you tense
against me there is historyI open
my body to it. Everyone at times
gets too close. But when I backed

into that delirium, unearthed
its warm fleshit left. It left

with the heat from the stones and even
the dusk felt oppressive.

But when I rooted into your chest
and slept in a blue curve by

your thigh it returned. Felt
something shift in your skull

no one saw it. Every day we must
live this. If you vanish

you are still there. Smoke,
do your laundryone still has dignity

no one has noticed. What good
is a conversation in darkness that

isnt raw. Requiring no company
we stayed there. Inseparable

loneliness. It left, it raged,
it wished to be quit of all pain
who can blame it? I loved it
I opened my body to it. It tore

through my cells, blistered my eyes
I took it into my arms told it

please. I held it to my throat un
abashed. You are here to explain this

in torrentsa rain that never comes.
It left in the wind, it spoke as it turned,

it carried me nowhere. Pulling me
close to its cheek. Even now as it goes.

That day in Junewe heard the echo of a meadowlark.

Let go the meadowlark and the valley in which its song
repeated itself and the valley in which its song unfolded.

Let go the dream of such clear sound.

Let go the walks, dinners, drinks, talks, senses of beginnings, let go
the beginnings, we will never begin again.

Let go the still gray sky. It has propped us up long enough.

Let go the nights.

Let go the voice that answered me in earnest in all things I find
I can no longer imagine it.

Imagine the rents in the driveway cement from the rain that pooled
and stayed and the way the cement buckled wildly in the years that followed
and the years that followed in which no one came to the door.

You came to the door and said my name and the whole weathered mess
glowed beneath hanging clouds and weeds
grew in blunt stalks from the cracks.

Who would you change for?

The maples change more in an hour of wind than we change.

The aspens shatter light I have felt the leaves in their wind-glittering strangeness. Let go

the town and its dry river paths the white bellies of the swallows
under the bridge flashing in the last minutes of dusk and I knew I could not
continue as I had been nor did I sense a course.

Who are your friends.

What do you care for.

What would you give up if you could give up
anything. When were you afraid there is no extreme need that is not
warped by fear. What does the world

require of you have you loved the time you have spent here.
Was it because of the people with you. Or that the silence

was never silence it was always the fans white noise in the window
at night and below that the new rain on the grass
and below that the grass as it bends under water
and night buried under water and the town