today i explode in this

from the poem bird: a memoir by susan mitchell

music, i could understand that need.  but this cry through
which the hawk funnels itself.  this narrow, this pinched -
what if all i had were two-line stanzas?  but a scream
is not language, not of any language part.  the same scream
over and over, whipping me, lashing.  the way sexual
desire is always the same feeling, the same channel
opening up between the legs, clawing

the body, finding the weakest spot to break out of.
tearing the body apart just to get out.
to open its mouth onto the other.
to suck lips, other lips, into itself.
and biting, biting, biting.
knowing in advance, this is how it's going to be.  and yet,
surprised, always the same surprise.

have i misled you?  did you think memoir meant some chronicle
of a great or splendid or tumultuous or even hysterical
century in which the famous lived?  did you expect the tone
and hue of the heroic?  some pilgrim's progress?  some
summa, some summing-up?  what, anyway, is a life?  why not
a memoir of the never finished, the only partly done?  or,
the not said, the not sung?  the underdrill of trill?

sometimes i think this, our life on earth, is an egg
to break out of.  i am claustrophobic.  into the next, into
the come-after and the come-what-may i shall peck and peck
myself, all naked of language, with only my meter
to sound the way.  what is it i am starved for?
eternity?  infinity?  forever?  or some
other word for emptiness?

to which, hush.  i stillness for stillness give, i silence
for silence.  if i am built around something i can never
understand, must i its keeper be?  must i caretake
the indigestible?  the secrets that interest me
are those from myself i keep, holes in which i lurk
by me undetected, so smoothly i the depth
of shadow mix and match.

heavenly perfume one body takes from another.  song
sung without opening the mouth.  confession is not
the same as intimacy.  and language does not open
the territory.  more like a bird calling, always up ahead,
yearning me deeper in.  here is a riddle for you,
unheimlicher bird.  what is so strange
it feels like home?  it calls.  i follow.

***

today i am perched on the tip of my tongue.  which of my
seven heavens shall i fly to?  today my attention
is everywhere at once.  to disperse, to unfocus
into showers of gold and tinsel is my one desire.
why must everything be dragged through intellect?
i am sick of meaning.  today i shall throw myself away
in puff after puff of furbish and spangle.

there was a garden: at night they snuffed the flowers,
but not their smells.  lemons burned in the trees.
a place for love?  or a place for work?  i can
no longer tell the two apart.
when the wind blew there was the sound of a sea.
my favorite moments flew off like spray.
what did i learn from this?

i liked to sleep there and also read.  was i content?
i liked to copy out of books words
that pleased me, sometimes whole passages, and as i
did this, there would rise up inside me
like a wave, there would start in my chest and
push up to my throat, a stairway without
any destination, ascending me again and again.

does joy have a purpose?  from plautus i copied out
a single word, ciccus, core of the pomegranate,
that elusive fruit which escapes the eater
every bite of the way.  surely there is more to it
than this, i'd think, sucking at seeds.
surely when i get to the center, the core: but the core
is throwaway, and ciccus also means worthless.

can anything said or thought be taken back?
today in my erotikon i wrote, art is relentless, it
refuses to look away.  it stares into me
with its hard mineral eye, inhuman.
once of myself i caught a look
all unaware in a mirror: a me apart
from any idea i have of me.

what a terrifying thing it is to be alone
with another.  should i have followed?  that glimpse
lasted a moment, no more - an acrobat, it leaped
into a world more daring: i was trapezed,
flared open, as when a cellist
drags the bow unendurably across the strings, and a more
than ordinary grieving - reckless, unheeding - begins.

should i have gone there?  in my erotikon
i always hope to find some shock
of music never listened to by me.  should i have
entered before it closed?  it was all so quick, like
birds shifting from branch to branch.
and would it have included love?
or does love need a world of its own?

***... ***

perhaps it's true, my happiest moments are the anticipation
of other moments still to come.  the evening, yet to be
unfurled, but its aroma released, burdening
the air with the heavy breathing
of the trees, their panting louder than the sky,
which has just let out squeals of acetylene and orange.
a smell so throaty, so from the armpits of the trees.

oh, to be fragrant, to break open into a great
fury of smells.  is aroma physical?  or of the spirit?
that promise of spirit tasting frustrates?
what the mouth can never close on,
twang of the elusive where instinct blurs
to indistinct?  what i hunger for
is not a parable of anything.

like feelings i come and go.  like those puddles birds
drink from after a heavy rain.  gone by morning.
and if the incomprehensible is all
that's left of the self, the personal, the private?  an outlying
beyond the sludge and gas stations, beyond
the medians where the music trembles
into blare and shouting.

bird be nimble, bird be quick, or the small
plot you call your bower will grow
into a long boring story.  there is a feeling that
comes before migration, a hastening, an upward
rush into the lining of something luxurious
no one has ever worn.
is this the future-

sound not yet an imitation
of anything?  pekke hem right up!  a voice
commanded in a dream.  peck up what?
the swirling dust, the unclear?  nightly didder of birds
when syllables intimate - but time is short.
from now on i will listen only to the arias.
spare me the long slow walk of the recitative.

do you become what you listen to?  branch
dipping, little gustos of fear, sudsy
places in the music, steepnesses, caliginous tropes?
my favorite songs are like thirst
as it is quenched.  and oh, that pale aching
green of twigs when the bark
is stripped back.

sometimes at dusk another voice begins, overripe
sweet to spoiling, a green beyond green.
so much comes at the last moment. 
like the final dance of the evening with its underbreath
of promise, its twinges of titillation, the tango
extending nervously its shadows, the long legs
of desire striding toward faster and faster tempos.

(from the book erotikon)

love song by susan mitchell

Love Song

yes I went to the ocean
because I wanted to live expansively slopping
over recklessly
unheeding every warning I gave myself

take me I said to the ocean

do me up like the comics in lurid
golds and greens above the horizon clouds
big as boulders seemed about to topple ocean

I have not come to hear the tiny smack a snow-
flake makes touching down I have
come for the fizzy the bubbly the foam
my morning cappuccino drifting in

to lick you up to keep spooning miles of creamy
swirls unswirling who knows what sweet
new ideas trapped still frothing

call me extravagance call me lolling about

to loiter at the edge of amplitude why not

look how the ocean pushes up against me
its nakedness oiled and slathered how it showers
me in rhinestones and glitz

tomorrow it may come rolling in milks
and ermines three crones crooning

oh lambent umpires of the wily wastes should love
be given its own tense unfettered
by the pasts and futures

to found or to founder says the ocean

succeed or surcease cry the crones love is
the antidote to its own poisons

hwaet I say to the ocean chasing after it hwaet

does the ocean say that is one way to begin

does it cry tie yourself to the mast or
master your cry rage sing

the rage of or sing what is all the rage

oh those ragas those regal rags raging

ritual by susan mitchell

susan was my poetry mentor at florida atlantic university

ritual

as one who casts the word bread upon the word waters, testing
as one who not believing something will rise up from
those waters, but not disbelieving either
casts out her voice 
as one curious or hungry or filled with longing breaks
off just the crust of a word, throwing
the way she threw as a girl when everyone
told her that was not the way
to throw and expecting little or nothing
looks into the blackness but the waves
are not black they will be deep
scummed violet and bronze
like a memorial forgotten
                                     would it have made a difference
if she had cast the word thread upon those waters
unspooling what she spoke     sewing
knots and tangles into waves and might
thread return to her as dread or even dead
as one who does not know what it is she wants
but wants her wanting sanctified
and anointed with myrrh and futility     black
the waves are black and laced with white
shrouds which pass
                                         into nothingness and the way
a snowflake vanishes
into the waves her voice cast out from her
she has wanted so long such a lifetime not
knowing what it is she wants
as one who has eaten joy for no good reason
with no idea where it came from
and wept in her sleep forgetting afterward who
embraced her but the next day feeling the loss
as one who casts word after word
into nothingness fillets ruins of foam cresting
so the word lover vanishes into water
and with it go fervor and savior forever
and elixir 
                         as one who keeps opening and closing
so the word birth is buried in earth so
the word breath is lost in death
as one who waits to see the eyes of water
roll back into depth, who waits
to see the depth rolled back and parted so she
can fly through and thinks she sees wings
and knows herself deluded
even though she sees
                                             as one who marked off
her wanting who staked its boundaries and let
nothing cross over to staunch or squander it
as one who says I want therefore I am
as one who saw the word bread float in the word water
before they both sank under
the weight of her wanting
as one who thought she saw something leap
but it may have been the word motion coming back
to her shadow for shadow
what is the hunger to know the other's
hunger built up like an altar
sacrifice she understood the blood
of her hunger wanting hunger for hunger, its
teeth in her flesh the word flesh the word hunger
as one who the more she looked saw less
what little there was she messed into more mess
there was no depiction in it
what would it take to register the quickness
the alacrity to blow out
the candle of the waves the word candle
the voice of the waves the word voice
the living face of the promise of the voice

Susan Mitchell, Best American Poetry 2008,
from The American Poetry Review