Our Andromeda Read Online Free PDF Page A

body, prone.
    Unbelievable that it is still today.

    How much more of it is left?
    How much more of tomorrow?

    I am not greedy. I ask because
    I hope for less than I have coming.

    I am not more than I hoped
    to be in my prayers

    in my girlhood, in my bonfire.
    Not in my ungodly unuttered

    then-ness. If that old boulder
    ever lived a day with any burden

    but itself then I will lift its hard-
    meat to a place of honor.

    Super-polished on the very top
    of the world’s biggest root.

    I am not ungrateful. I will face
    the stranger’s face in any light

    from any lamp or lucky gold
    three-wish thing. I will not

    wish for two things and then use
    the third wish for three more.

    I won’t take more than I have,
    and I don’t have to want

    what I already have from before.
    It’s too quiet and sorry to want,

    and the place of wanting is too sore
    to stuff it with hard rock,

    hard luck, or it’s too far back
    to even see the stuff anymore.

    I’m open. I’m old. I just want
    the wishing to go back home

    or to send me back, in its place,
    to where the giving is given out.

Mermaid’s Purse

    There is no such thing as sacrifice,
    though the bleeding doesn’t end.

    The self is the self yet bigger than itself.
    Indebted. And subordinate

    to the unity of its fragments,
    loopholes in the loop of wholeness.

    Cat sharks lay their eggsacs,
    which eat themselves in gestation,

    for if fewer mature sharks,
    bigger portions at the feast

    of the loggerhead turtle, which
    will never again be a single entity.

    Out of one, many.
If blameless,
    then meaningless, dissolved

    by a cloud of sardines, flashing
    silver as if paying for breakfast

    in a silent movie starring no stars.

Vanity

    To think that, in my sorrow,
    I thought it was permissible to flick
    myself away like a fly from the full-length

    mirror on opening night. Curled the hot
    hair around my crowded face,
    warming up the audience for a flop.

    I thought I’d be bought something,
    by one who admired me. Some lost meal,
    hours of fat drink check, a copselike rope

    of rubies for my waist. But no. I’m selfsame:
    a wordsmith wearing too much paint,
    my inking irons heavy in the rain.

    The night is an imperfect story
    for us all. It leaves things out.
    The witch’s song can’t prove itself

    beautiful enough to sing at dawn
    for the enchanted child
    in an ordinary story about the night.

    No small favor, no laughing matter.
    Pass the meat through a slot
    in the chamber. This whole self

    can be as silent as a chain saw rusted
    on the broken fever of my song’s rain,
    my night’s story, my ink iron’s brains.

    In spite of the spot-checking,
    the self-seeking, the meticulous soul-smithing,
    I am still me, lacking.

    Like murders in books, but with reverse
    precision, how anyone becomes herself
    is a mystery. A miracle. A myth.

5. OUR ANDROMEDA

At the Book Shrink

    one learns to say “My body uses me
    as a grape uses wine”—

    to talk about inevitability,
    the essence of plot.

    But what happens when a person
    understands she is being sent

    back, glass by glass,
    to the invisible pouring stations

    of the larger narrative?
    That she is merely like or likely

    a person in a book?
    Like a saltwater balloon

    sinking in the ocean.
    Like a person in a book, like

    I said already. Someone’s
    not listening. Someone’s

    eating breakfast or falling
    asleep or texting a married lover

    as shrinks are wont to do.
    If I am boring then at least

    I am getting somewhere:
    through the wood I knock on.

    My story is telling.
    But it’s not telling
me
.

    I need help getting to the next part.
    When I open my mouth,

    liquid rushes in, endrunkening.
    When I close it,

    dark, secret-looking drops spill
    crimson on the page.

Headlong

    Be strange to yourself,
    in your love, your grief.

    Your wet eyelashes a black
    fringe on brown pain

    and your feet unbelievably
    sure, somehow, surfing

    your own