Olmec
The bone-crushing pain
of turning into a jaguar:
palpable in the shaman’s
cleft head carved in basalt
or jade; in his downturned
squared-off open mouth;
lips stretched and dilated
in birthing, in a scream.
Try to imagine yourself
crossing from one world
of pain into another, the quiet
needed to summon the fury
needed to catapult you over.
For the umpteenth time,
until entranced, I trace over
a talismanic cascade of spirals
copied from an old book.
Images smuggled out
from the border, TV loops,
stream into my closed eyes.
In no other world but this
we watch as mother is again
and again torn from child,
no glyph known for repair.
– Carol Moldaw in The New York Review of Books, February 21, 2019
Carol Moldaw’s poetry navigates intimacy and politics through subtle shifts in tone and the tug of the line. She is the author of Beauty Refracted, a poetry collection (Four Way Books, 2018); The Widening, a short novel; The Lightning Field, which was awarded The Field Prize; and a chapbook, Through the Window, which was published as Pencereden in Istanbul, in a bi-lingual Turkish-English edition. Moldaw is the recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in poetry, a Pushcart Prize, and a Lannan Foundation Marfa Writer’s Residency. Her book So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems, was shortlisted for the PEN Southwest Book Award (2011). Moldaw grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and received her undergraduate degree from Harvard College and an M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University. From 2005-2008, she was on the faculty of Stonecoast, the University of Southern Maine’s low-residency MFA. program, and she has conducted residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, taught at the College of Santa Fe and in the MFA program at Naropa University, as well as Bucknell’s Stadler Center for Poetry. In the spring of 2011, she served as Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University. Moldaw teaches privately and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with her husband and daughter. This interview focuses on Moldaw’s most recent collections of poetry as well as her new work.
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Tyler Mills: In Beauty Refracted, place — specifically the landscape in Pojoaque and how the self moves through and observes the world — is such a crucial part of the poetics of the collection. I’m thinking in particular about your “Loop” sequence of poems that appear throughout the book. What’s at stake for you in your poems and poetics in writing about place? What has been challenging and rewarding in engaging place in a book like Beauty Refracted?
Carol Moldaw: Place is how I locate my Self, my inner self. Place and writing both — the two become entwined. My temperament as a writer is inward-looking, and place helps me to express that in an outer and textural way. It is a vehicle for expression and exploration as well as a record of the outer world I inhabit.
I was lucky enough to live in Pojoaque, an old agricultural valley north of Santa Fe, for almost 25 years, and to take the same walk or a variation of the same walk along the seasonal Pojoaque River and up a ridge called the Barrancas almost daily for most of those years. I wanted the “Loops” to convey a mix of aspects of the land and what went on in my head during a walk. Walks like that — recreational, meditative — circle back to where they began. They aren’t about arriving somewhere new. They don’t have an end point, a destination—they have a turning point. Poems don’t always circle back to where they began, but they are at least as much about the unfolding of trains of thoughts as they are about arrival at a place of revelation or epiphany. The poem might lead you to its end, but the end is never the poem’s whole point.
In Beauty Refracted, place is a through-line. More than a setting, it is how I come to understand the world and myself. The Pojoaque River appears throughout, as do other characteristics of the valley’s landscape, the cottonwoods, the ridge, fields and a large sky. During some of the time I was writing it, I knew or suspected that I would be leaving the Valley soon after. That gave describing my experience of it some urgency for me, and poignancy.
It’s challenging to write about a place where one is travelling or visiting as a tourist, since one’s knowledge only skims the surface and one is more of a bystander than a part of the place. I went on two major trips during the many years that I worked on Beauty Refracted. One was to Roanoke, Virginia, where I spent a semester at Hollins University as Writer-in-Residence. The other was to Delhi for an international poetry festival organized by the poet Sudeep Sen. We also traveled in Northern India for an extra week or so. I wrote poems based in both Virginia and India, because both were significant experiences for me. The poem “Varanasi” intertwines those two landscapes, as experiencing spring’s blossoming in Virginia while I was writing about being on the Ganges became an important part of the poem.
In the poem “Beauty, Refracted,” landscape figures much less. It’s a very interior poem, both in the sense of being indoors and in the psyche. The setting for that poem is — the kitchen table? A child’s bedroom? And yet when I wrote it, I felt like I was setting down an entire world.
Tyler Mills: Both Beauty Refracted and The Lightning Field center on long poems that become the cores and title poems of the books. I’d like to ask you a question about form, but first I’d like to ask how you decide that a book will take shape around a central longer poem ? Could you speak to what it was like writing your marvelous poem “Beauty, Refracted” — which is about childhood, mothering, and the imagination and so many other things — before you decided that this would be the title poem for your collection? And was your process similar in any ways to how you found “The Lightning Field” as the title poem for your previous collection?
Carol Moldaw: Writing “Beauty, Refracted” was a very different experience from writing “The Lightning Field,” though having written the earlier long sequence certainly informed and taught me, and gave me confidence when I tackled “Beauty, Refracted.”
I felt compelled to write “Beauty, Refracted.” A few different objectives drove me. I was trying to make sense — gain some understanding and give order to — a complicated multi-level months-long experience that had altered all my family. In many ways, it wasn’t primarily my experience, so that also made it complicated for me to write about and even to outline now. I wanted to understand the experience on a lyric level, for myself, and I wanted to record it in an ‘objective’ but non-clinical way, for later, for the benefit of one who might not consciously remember it. And yet it was my point of view. I was always aware of the delicacy of my project and slightly uneasy about it while at the same time it felt personally important, vital, that I write it.
I had a few contemporaneous journal-type notes but I didn’t start working on the poem until over a year after the time period I wanted to re-enter and write about. I know it took well over a year to write, though I wrote a few shorter poems in the midst of it. It’s a bit of a blur. When I did start working on it, I knew it would be a poem in sections, and that each section would be an impression or an aspect of what I had observed, felt, thought, or imagined. In one of my early notes, I mentioned the idea that the sections alternate in perspective, from the cosmic to the minute, from the domestic to the mythic. I wasn’t sure how many sections there would be, I thought anywhere from 7-13, but eventually 11 sections was what I had and it seemed right, based as it was on an 11-year old.
My two lodestars were the Sleeping Beauty fairytale and Marie Louise von Franz’s book The Feminine in Fairy Tales. I wanted to retain a sense of individual experience while also allowing it the mythic shape I thought it deserved. In one note I wrote to myself, I used the phrase “the impersonal intimate” — which was the note I was trying to strike.
It was a hard poem to title and for a long time I resisted having it be the title poem. I think I wrote the sequence a little more than half-way through the group of poems that became the book, and I kept looking for another title. I was concerned that the poem didn’t connect enough to the other poems and that it was awkward in itself. I liked other titles, but none of the poems those went with seemed to carry enough weight to shoulder the book: A Leaf’s Gravity; Dew Point; Since Then; As Far As I Can Tell. Eventually, when I thought of taking out the comma that is in the poem’s title and leaving it out of the book title, then I could accept “Beauty Refracted” as an overall title. It seemed like a nice way to reference poems themselves as being refractions, and beauty — the beauty of living and of language — as an over-arching theme.
Writing “The Lightning Field” felt very different. For one thing, it’s an ekphrastic poem, inspired by Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field, a massive and massively austere work of land art near Quemado, New Mexico. And in this case, I knew the shape of the poem immediately: I wanted it to mimic, in a sense, the shape of The Lightning Field, which is 16 poles by 25 poles equidistantly spread over a mile by a kilometer. Amazingly, that form alone I found compelling, along with the idea that a line was somehow a pole and the idea that anything could go into it, anything that occurred during the writing of it. That was not the way that I usually approached a poem, and at the time it was exhilarating. I think I wrote somewhere that I wanted the writing of the poem to attract lightning the way that lightning poles do. Because my relationship to my husband, Arthur Sze, was new at the time, it became partially a love poem. And I’m sure that our exchange of aesthetic ideas — his inclusivity in his poetry — also was part of the electric charge that I felt writing it.
I know that the sections of “The Lightning Field” were not written in order. I always had in mind that some sections would describe the Lightning Field itself, but the rest was an unknown. I also knew that the title would be the book’s title. There are many ekphrastic poems in that book, or poems that reference objects, places and things, so it seemed congruent. Placing it — 16 sections by itself — in the manuscript seemed tricky though. I got some feedback that it was unusual to have the title poem in the middle of the book, especially when it is the longest poem. But as I worked on choreographing the book, it was clear to me that the middle was where it belonged. My books aren’t sequential narrative stories that need to be tightly arranged chronologically, but there are personal references that are markers in certain poems. It wouldn’t have felt right to me to have a long poem that was clearly written in the middle of a new relationship come after poems that referenced miscarriage or adoption. Books build up accretions of information; sometimes a reader isn’t even aware of it. But I don’t like jerking a reader around. I think of poems as written for myself and arrangements of books as made for readers.
Tyler Mills : When you are writing your long poems, as well as your gorgeous shorter lyric poems in stanzas and couplets, how do you find their forms? In other words, what are your thoughts about form when it comes to your writing process?
Carol Moldaw: It’s tempting to anthropomorphize poems, to give them their own agency, to write “a poem might shape itself from the very beginning.” Writing of a poem’s “voice” anthropomorphizes it too. Voice is a word I use all the time, but now I wonder if “tone” or “tones” might be more accurate. Occasionally, I have to search for the tone, and finding the form goes along with that. I’m trying to find something to amplify and refine the impulse that is my first inkling about the poem, and that may involve diction and imagery and syntax and phrasing, a rhetorical structure and a stance. I think about and play with the number of beats in a line, the kind of line break, where fruitful enjambments are to be found, the shape — or shapes — of the stanzas. I try to listen to sounds as they emerge and to hear them as clues.
If I use a rhyme scheme, that is often a deliberate choice, sometimes made before a poem has much gotten started. Other times, I start to notice rhyme that I hadn’t made with deliberation but then play with, whether I regularize it into a pattern or not. I tend to find both unpatterned rhyme and half-rhyme pleasing.
The issue of the shape of stanzas is important and interesting to me. Again, I try to take my cue from what I find emerging. I also try not to settle on something definitively too soon and to keep an open mind. I usually feel uneasy about what I’m writing, uncertain, until a shape begins to form. Feeling the shape helps me fully enter the poem’s world and in that immersion things begin to happen.
It’s common to understand form as a constraint, and it obviously is. It can be a freeing constraint though. In occupying the part of the brain that it tasked with passing the censor, the arbiter of whether the chosen formal constraints are being satisfyingly fulfilled and whether they are the right constraints, it also occupies the censor, giving more leeway for unconscious material and grace to slip through. When the poem is in sync with its form — or in some kind of counterpoint to it — and language begins to throb — the act of writing can be very gratifying, exciting and pleasurable.
Tyler Mills: The lively scenes of Beauty’s stuffed animals that appear throughout “Beauty, Refracted” tell a story about childhood and also a transition into adolescence. I’m thinking especially of this passage,
No amount of money can buy
a cloud, so in the Bunny World
there is no money, no commerce.
No dating either, at first, though
Briar Rose, the frolicking mare,
pines for Phoebus, who lost an eye
in battle and, chivalrous lion
that he is, pretends not to notice.
Whose idea was it to introduce
the troupe to spin-the-bottle?
— Their personalities a mash-up
of psyches, free-associative patter,
riffed-on pratfall, put-down,
peacemaking, each night refines. (III, 28-41)
The stuffed animals are like the chorus of creatures in the Sleeping Beauty fairytale, though here they’re staged into a story that the young girl in the poem creates for herself. What was it like to craft these vignettes and shape the poem with them? In what ways were you thinking about setting up the final — powerful — lines of the poem with these stories that the girl tells through her toys? For readers new to your wonderful book, the final lines are, “She woke, not to a kiss // but to herself, and once that sealed-off sleep / has slipped away, it dream-like stays forgotten.”
Carol Moldaw: I’ve never had so many characters — I’m tempted to say people — in my poems before! The stuffed animals all developed strong distinctive personalities and bringing their society in seemed to me the best way to give a sense of the richness and ‘reality’ of Beauty’s inner world. At times, I felt self-conscious about them — and sometimes still do, when reading the poem to an audience. I think it’s unusual to enter that fully into a child’s world unless it’s in a child’s sphere, say actual nursery rhymes or a children’s book. But it felt very vital to me, and those sections were exciting, pleasurable, to write. The closest I’ll ever come to writing down an oral history.
Each one of the three sections with the stuffed animal has a different tone and purpose. First, in the section you quoted, they are introduced as a troupe, a circus act, with some players highlighted. Then Briar Rose gets her own section, her own scene. She’s a bit of a drama-queen and comic. In the third section, I wanted to go deeper into the myth of the tribe and also, especially, the way that Beauty is their ruler and they are vulnerable to her whims. I wanted to give a sense of how her relationship to them might be changing, as she kisses them and kicks them off the bed.
I hadn’t thought specifically about these sections with the stuffed animals as setting up the ending, but once I started thinking about your question, I realized that kissing — the idea of kissing — is in all of them: the kiss of spin-the bottle; Briar Rose’s implicitly mooning for a kiss from either Phoebus, the stuffed lion, or DaVinci, the real horse; the whole troupe lining up for their good night kisses. So, in a sense, I guess they do set up Beauty waking, unlike Sleeping Beauty in the fairytale, “not to a kiss/but to herself.” I felt — and wanted to convey — an essential mystery in both the process of the going under described in the poem and the coming out of it. I wanted to explore what I was writing about but not to explain it.
Tyler Mills: I love how skepticism appears in your poems—as a stance that the speaker takes toward language. I’m thinking about the opening of “Metrics,” which begins,
Though the earnestness of artists bores me
as do admonitions in art,
I admit I begrudge certain words
for worming their way into my poems.
How do you know when certain words will end up “worming their way into my poems?” Do you have a journal where you collect words that strike you (or that you tangle with!) or do you have a different method?
Carol Moldaw: What I meant to convey in that first line is that what bores me is the earnestness of artists about their own art. While I might respond fully to the ambition of an artwork, the stated ambitions of artists tend to grate on me. That’s harsh, and probably unfair, but it’s related to my constitutional distaste for grandstanding, sanctimony, programmatic thinking, assumptions — uses of language I find hard to abide.
In many ways, I think of a poem as an inquiry, an open-ended inquiry. Sometimes when I’m writing I feel like I’m making a case, though I only discover through building the poem what the case may be. Perhaps that idea comes from my one year of law school, but I’ve always felt strict about language. I like to find the right words for things; I like people to say what they mean and mean what they say. I want the words — and the beliefs, metaphors, ideas they convey — to resonate and to hold up to examination. It’s not only received language, dead metaphor, simple cliché, jargon that is insidious. Sometimes it’s the highfalutin or the whispered sentiment or the pounded fist. I used to tell students that you could make a reading of the phone book moving — I guess I’d better update that example — if you used all the right intonations — which obviously makes the reading of it, the evocation of emotion, a manipulation and a lie.
I’ve kept a journal of words that interest me only sporadically. Often, I put a word that occurs to me — or more often a combination of words, sometimes rhymes or word sounds that strike me — on the margin of my workbook, which is itself a hodgepodge of phrases, draftings, observations, ideas. In those jottings, I notice I’m drawn toward words that have reverberating sounds and disparate meanings. The weighing of words — knowing when one is just adequate or simply wrong or exactly IT — is part of developing one’s voice as a poet. The choices can be intuitive, the word can come as a gift, be sought after, interrogated. They are not always consciously-made — and that is important — but in the end — and maybe not until close to the end — I think the choices need to be closely and consciously examined. For me, writing a poem is a back-and-forth exchange among levels of consciousness, including, importantly, the unconscious and the subconscious, from which, I tend to believe, the most important poetic impulses originate. The words that are guideposts are often the words that weren’t sought but appear.
Tyler Mills: I’m fascinated by what you said about writing and the mind: “For me, writing a poem is a back-and-forth exchange among levels of consciousness, including, importantly, the unconscious and the subconscious, from which, I tend to believe, the most important poetic impulses originate.” Inspiration is a conversation of a kind — one that is ongoing. Is there a poem in particular either from Beauty Refracted, a previous collection — like The Lightning Field — or perhaps your new manuscript that you think especially exemplifies the way writing can be dialogic for you? If possible, is there a particular moment of a poem you could share that came from this kind of process?
Carol Moldaw: Now that I’m having to examine my own words, I wonder if “back-and-forth exchange” was the right phrase to use for the interchange between the conscious and unconscious, because it makes the exchange seem clear-cut and identifiable. When I’m absorbed in a poem, different layers of consciousness get activated without my being aware of it.
I began “Lou Reed in Istanbul” — which didn’t have that title yet — with the strong desire to describe Topkapi’s harem as it resonated in my imagination, which had also been informed by reading. The imagined world of the harem spoke compellingly to me of female mysteries and sufferings. The women were captive and also, within bounds, formed their own secretive society. I didn’t expect that the Lou Reed concert, which I went to the same week that I visited the harem, would barge into the poem, nor did I expect that describing Lou Reed would lead me back to the first time I heard Transformers, when I was seventeen and travelling alone and with a kind of reckless freedom in Spain. With Lou Reed bridging them, the harem and that complicated moment in my life became connected: in a sense, he becomes a psychopomp figure. It was the writing itself, and not my conscious mind that allowed the associations to unfold. I think what makes the connection hold is the relationship to primal female experience that both the harem and my young self had.
The writing of all poems has an unaccountable element to it. I wrote “Timetable for Birds,” also in The Lightning Field,during the long period of time — longer than a normal gestation period—of applying to adopt our daughter from China and waiting to be approved and then to be given a date. Visiting a friend who was cleaning out her apartment, I came across an old timetable recording the exact time different kinds of birds were sighted taking off and landing in Kansas City. That kind of birder’s document of minute recording was new to me and I found it oddly mesmerizing. I don’t think I knew when I started the poem that the last lines would be addressed to the daughter I was waiting for, knew nothing about and wouldn’t see for close to a year:
“And you? Will your arrival, your crowning,
be clocked? A penciled note, a bracelet
of red thread twining your fledgling wrist?”
The level at which engaging with an obsessive birder’s document I didn’t fully understand led to my finding a way to express my own deep longings to hear news of, to ‘sight’ my daughter, is mysterious enough. But it was only when we finally were able to bring our daughter home from China and saw the few documents relevant to her birth that I found out that she had been born during the week when I was intensely involved in writing a poem that ended with the question of her birth and whether it would be marked, noted, in any way. That simultaneity filled me with joy and is, I think, an awesome example of the otherworldly ways the conscious mind and the unconscious—the larger unconscious—interact, often completely unknown to us.
Tyler Mills: Your recent poems face our world today at its most terrible. Your poem “Olmec” published in the New York Review of Books ends,
In no other world but this
we watch as mother is again
and again torn from child,
no glyph known for repair.
Your poems engage with politics without grandstanding — they feel timely but also timeless, and this is such a hard thing to achieve in political work. Could you speak to your process or how you find your subject in poems such as this one? Are there poems or poets you turn to especially now as you write about the present?
Carol Moldaw: “Olmec” is an example of how unexpected connections can be made by engaging in the poetic process as well as the world we live in. When I started the poem, I had no idea that it would end up with an image of border separations. Even though I’m engaged with the world as a citizen, I find it very difficult to bring that civic engagement into my writing. I think it has to do with what I mentioned earlier, my inward and meditative impulses as a poet. The image of a man, a shaman, turning into a jaguar was one I had been working with and trying to get right for quite a while, and I had no idea where it would go or what it was linked to. The image had a grip on me because of my fascination with the invisible spiritual world and the different ways cultures access it. As I finally began to shape the lines in a way I could live with, I was also hearing and seeing on the nightly news the family separations at the border. I never thought, ‘oh, this is what my poem is about.’ Instead, working on the poem led me there. When, in the third and fourth stanza I wrote “Try to imagine yourself/crossing from one world of pain into another, the quiet/needed to summon the fury//needed to catapult you over” I started those lines thinking about the shamans and ended them thinking about the people looking for asylum and that is when the poem began to find its full expression.
I struggle with the idea that what I write may be irrelevant to the realities of the conditions of our world. I care about the inner world and the individual voice and the realities of the psyche, but these are obviously not our whole story. So, I am always struggling with how to let more in, how to refocus and widen my lens. At the same time, I am drawn to internal states. “Olmec” felt like a breakthrough and I hope I am able to build on it. Lately I find that I am writing more specifically about women and men, not ideologically, but in terms of examining internal assumptions and pressures as well as those of society.
Many poets engage with politics well. In terms of influences, I admire much of Adrienne Rich’s work and it was certainly important to me when I was young. Her first New and Selected came out when I was in college and the change in her voice and her concerns over her first books was a revelation to me. I found the poems in Diving into the Wreck especially rewarding. Although later there is a polemic quality to much of her work, her lyric impulse never left her. I admire the way she followed her conscience where it led. I also admire Seamus Heaney’s engagement both with political issues and the problem of the relationship of poetry with politics and polemics. He brought both problems into his poems in a searching way, and that level of honesty is a huge example for me.
For many years, lines from Miklós Radnóti’s “Forced March” have been talismanic to me. Translated beautifully by Zsusanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner, they are well-known both for themselves and for having been found on Radnóti’s body, which was in a mass grave, one of those dug by the prisoners themselves before being shot by the Nazis. To me, they exemplify the ferocious and beautiful will of an individual consciousness to witness minutely and record and memorialize, even in the midst of attempted dehumanization and up to the moment of death:
I fell beside him and his corpse turned over,
tight already as a snapping string.
Shot in the neck. “And that’s how you’ll end too,”
I whisper to myself: “lie still: no moving.
Now patience flowers in death.” Then I could hear
“Der sprint noch auf,” above and very near.
Blood mixed with mud was drying in my ear.
Tyler Mills: What are your hopes for your poems over the next few months? While we’ve been self-isolating due to COVID-19, in what ways — perhaps new, perhaps not — have poems been part of your life under these new circumstances?
Carol Moldaw: As much as I’d like to state with certainty that my poems over the next few months will reflect, observe and elucidate the realities of our lives now, and not just my life, but the multitudinous challenges facing individuals and our society as a whole, I can’t know. For one thing, writing from the present moment has always been a challenge for me. For another, it would take a prodigious outward looking talent to be able to encompass the drastic changes that have happened already and the challenges we’ll face. I’m not sure what strategies my more inward-looking tendencies will adopt. But there is no doubt that the world has changed, that there is a ‘before’ and an ‘after,’ and that anything that doesn’t acknowledge our new realities seems laggard or a product of nostalgia or wishful thinking. I hope, in my own way, to be up to the challenge.
I was in Boston on a kind of informal writing retreat for a number of weeks, and came home in early March, just before social distancing and shelter-in-place were beginning to be implemented. Just before I left, I started a poem about being in Boston and kept working on it from New Mexico, while the pandemic spread in the U.S. and our society was transformed overnight. I never know how a poem will end beforehand, but as I approached the end there was only one way to go: to acknowledge the enormous gulf between when I left Boston, only days before, “when I stood/transfixed and free on the street,” and the poem’s present moment, the moment of writing, when enacting unselfconscious public lingering and freedom was already unthinkable.
In many ways, having that writing retreat before all this happened was incredibly fortunate. It helped prepare me. My life in those weeks was pared down; for the most part I was focused on my work. Normally, at home, I’m pulled six ways at once. Not being subject to all of those pulls, having an enforced isolation, has given me more focus to read, to read poetry from the big unread pile on my desk. Not that I’m not constantly scrolling the news and watching detective shows and checking in on friends around the country and obsessing about what the future holds. But poetry, whether contemplative or indignant, whether inward looking or facing squarely into the maelstrom, is a form of sanity and a lifeline.
LOOP: POJOAQUE
A restless sleeper, the Pojoaque shifts
in its gravel bed and sighs, shrinks into itself,
secretes mud curls. I try to keep everything
I think in my head but each former thought
a new one displaces. By the time I’m home
I forget them all. Owl guano drips down
the arroyo’s side. On the mesa, small precipices,
out-juttings. Horsetail, tamarisk, grow
where they are blown, root in river sand —
also the cow hoof, the plexi camper shell.
– Beauty Refracted (Four Way Books, 2018)
LOU REED IN ISTANBUL
In the poem I had in mind
one blue-tiled stanza
containing a striped divan
and a single cut tulip
ends at a latticed window
behind whose fretwork
an entire regiment
of red-turbaned tulips
is posted, standing guard
with drawn daggers.
Steam obscured one stanza,
making its marble sweat,
veiling its women’s naked
boredom with languor,
their faint mustachios
with clove-scented dew
(dew that dissolves
on the tongue like sugar
but tastes bitter-briny,
indigestible as tears).
A sinuous line of incense
led to an inner courtyard
where someone crouched
over a brass brazier, fanned
wisps of musky smoke
up the bellows of her skirt.
Hearing the click-clack
of my heels on the cobble
she turned to appraise me,
quickly got back to work.
— That mother-of-pearl
intarsiate poem, poem
of the narrow-necked vase,
the bejeweled mirror,
of pumice and water pipes
and plush labyrinthian
women who glide up
from the foot of the bed,
who hide their emotions
“even from the moon” —
Lou Reed shanghaied
that poem, he runs
its arched passageways
despotic as a eunuch,
slouches on its pillows
the sheer-stockinged
corseleted cross-dresser
on “Transformer’s” cover,
where, in Bilbao at 17,
listening to “Vicious,”
to “Satellite of Love,”
in a Spanish boy’s bed
a year before Franco
finally died, high
on codeine cough syrup,
I first saw him, his cock
in the facing photo
a concealed nightstick.
Now, listening to his
roughed-up dead pan
under a domed moon
just up the Bosphorus
from Topkapi’s seraglio,
watching some starlings
swoop toward the stage
to flit in the lights,
I remember how it felt,
the blood rush — swoop,
swoop, oh baby, rock,
rock — of being set loose.
– The Lightning Field (Oberlin College Press, 2003)