Brock-Broido - Stay, illusion

Stay, Illusion
Lucie Brock-Broido

Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2013 This Is a Borzoi Book
Published by Alfred A. Knopf Copyright 2013 by Lucie Brock-Broido All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. constitute an extension of this page. eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-96204-1
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-96202-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brock-Broido, Lucie.
[Poems. eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-96204-1
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-96202-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brock-Broido, Lucie.
[Poems.

Selections]
Stay, Illusion : Poems / By Lucie Brock-Broido.First Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-307-96202-7 (Hardcover)
I. Title.
PS 3552. R 6145 A 6 2013
811.54dc23 2013023978 Jacket image: The Wilton Diptych (reverse, detail). Anonymous, 14th c. National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY
Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson First Edition v3.1 For My SistersAnnie, Julie, and Melissa

Silk spool of the recluse as she confects her eventual mythomania. If it is written down, you cant rescind it.

Spoon and pottage bowl. You are starving. Come closer now. What if I were gone and the wind still reeks of hyacinth, what then. Who will I be: a gaudy arrangement of nuclei, an apple-size gray circle On the tunic of a Jew, preventing more bad biological accidents From breeding-in. I have not bred In.

Each child still has one lantern inside lit. May the Mother not Blow her children out. She says her hair is thinning, thin. The flowerbed is black, sumptuous in emptiness. Blue-footed mushrooms line the walkway to my door. I would as soon Die as serve them in a salad to the man I love.

We lie down In the shape of a gondola. Venice is gorgeous cold. 3 December, Unspeakable anxiety about locked-in syndrome, about a fourth world. I cannot presume to say. The violin spider, she Has six good eyes, arranged in threes. The rims of wounds have wounds as well.

Sphinx, small print, you are inscrutable. On the roads, blue thistles, barely Visible by night, and, by these, you may yet find your way home.

What was it I was hungry about. Hunger, it is one Of the several contraptions I can turn on the off-button to at will. Yes, yes, of course it is an Art. Of course I will not be here Long, not the way the percentages are going now.

He might have been Half-beautiful in a certain optic nerve Of light, but legible only at particular Less snowy distances. I was fixed on The poplar and the dread. The night was lung-colored And livid stillhe would have my way With me. In this district of late Last light, indicated by the hour Of the beauty of his neck, his face was Arabian in contour Like a Percheron grazing in his dome of grass. If there is a god, he is not done Yet, as if continuing to manhandle the still lives of The Confederate dead this far north, this time of year, each Just a ghostly reason now. Of course there are reasons.

One: Soon the wind will blow Pentecostal with the power of group prayer. Two: the right to bear arms. Three: he did not find my empathy Supernatural, at the very least! Have you any ideas that are new? I was fixed on the scythe and the harlequin, on the priggish Butcher as he cut the tenderloin and When I saw this spectacle, I wanted to live for A moment for a moment. However inelegant it was, It was what it might have been to be alive, but tenderly. One thing. One thing.

One thing: Tell me there is A meadow, afterward.

If my own voice falters, tell them hubris was my way of adoring you. The hollow of the hulk of you, so feverish in life, cut open, Reveals ten thousand rags of music in your thoracic cavity. The hands are received bagged and examination reveals no injury. Winter then, the body is cold to the touch, unplunderable, Kept in its drawer of old-world harrowing. Teeth in fair repair.

Will you be buried where; nowhere. Your mouth a globe of gauze and glossolalia. And opening, most delft of blue, Your heart was a mess A mob of hoofprints where the skittish colts first learned to stand, Catching on to their agility, a shock of freedom, wild-maned. The eyes have hazel irides and the conjunctivae are pale, With hemorrhaging. One lung, smaller, congested with rose smoke. The other, filled with a swarm of massive sentimentia.

I adore you more. I know The wingspan of your voice, whole gorgeous flock of harriers, Cannot be taken down. You would like it now, this snow, this hour. Your visitation here tonight not altogether unexpected. The night-laborers, immigrants all, assemble here, aching for to speaking, Longing for to work.

Tell the truth I told me When I couldnt speak.

Sorrows a barbaric art, crude as a Viking ship Or a child Who rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer In the 1930s Toward the iron lung of polio. According to the census I am unmarried And unchurched. The woman in the field dressed only in the sun. Too far gone to halt the Arctic Caps catastrophe, big beautiful Blubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of ice. I am obliged, now, to refrain from dying, for as long as it is possible.

And to the curious I say, Dont be nave. And to the curious I say, Dont be nave.

The soul, like a trinket, is a she. I lay down in the tweed of one man that first frost night. I did not like the wool of him. You have one mitochondrial speck of evidence on your cleat. They can take you down for that. Did I forget to mention that when youre dead Youre dead a long time.

My uncle, dying, told me this when asked, Why stay here for such suffering. A chimney swift flits through the fumatorium. I long for one last Blue democracy, which has broke my heart a while. How many minutes have I left, the lover asked, To still be beautiful? I took his blond face in my hands and kissed him blondely on his mouth.

Green as alchemy and even more scarce, little can be known Of the misfortunes of a saint condemned to turn great sorrows Into greater egrets, ice-bound and irrevocable. The wings were left ajar At the altar where Ive knelt all night, trembling, leaning, rough As sugar raw, and sweet.

From the outside, peering in, it would seem My life had been smooth as a Prussian ship gliding on the bridegroom Of her Baltic waters in a season of no wind. Tinny empire, Neighborhood of Bokhara silks, were you to go, I would stopsimply As a pilgrim putting down his cup. Most of my life, I had consorted with the unspeakable, longing to put my mouth On it. I was just imagining. I can be Resumed. Some nights, I paint into the scene two Doves, I being alternately one and then the other, calling myself by my kind.

In the living will if it says: Hydrate. Please. Hydration only. Do not resume me then.

In Belarus, the fourteen-year-olds one thin flight away Heard Oswald singing in the shower, In his cool American. It was 1959. In crush They sent a note to say how sweet A songbird he was then. Dear Girls, he wrote, I want very much to meet you, too.