Excerpts

The Heart Is to a Pleasant Thing Compare the heart to any pleasant thing. Compare an apple to a snake. Failed experiments we are bound to apply endlessly. Or ignore entirely. In any case, we are rarely seated simply. Here is the tool I currently find useful. Snake's middle, or some callous bulge in the peel. I intended to love only what was given. It's difficult to find the wound. To walk into a field and obscure anything. To leave each flower picked clean. Historically, the last petal becomes your fortune. He loves me not. Everything is made equal by darkness. Let's see how the trees can rebound. Let's see how I can make you mine. *** The Pond Small places burst with love for you. My hand is an oar. An eardrum expanding. A ribbon pulled across the wrist. You hear bells ringing in another country, a sound that echoes only in your head. Let me tell you how the bells began to colonize even me. Let me tell you about the betrayal of my organs. For the first time I knew why you wanted out of this world. The way home was through your undoing. For days you circled the pond, such a careful plotting. I could only watch, finger the purple valance. And later, I confess: I saw you walk into the pond, straight down and into it, that terrible blue mouth. Who was I to prevent your sinking, to call out, when nothing in this world deserved you? Your floating hat gives you up, the housekeeper rushing to pull you back. My reckless emissary, my drowning fox-- you come back to me muted and heavy. *** How We Prepared for War It was necessary to become cold. To forget the lives we'd dreamed of. The days were taut and full of smoke. Our pockets were mostly empty. We practiced crawling through progressively smaller holes. Made quick work of a tangled bandage. You served me poisoned, oily fish until my mouth became a bell that only you could hear. I came to crave the lovely pain--my strange want-- and ate the fish with gusto. Every day prepared us for the next explosion. I lived as though you moved the earth, its axis stilled when you entered a room. The slow ravage of my gut surprised no one. When the war began I would stand stupid and stunned, unconvinced the world could throttle on beyond our pause, our meticulous training. *** Some Elaborate Brother, you began to leave me early, chose to offer yourself to the ground beneath horses and trains, refused to focus on my face, this world a water too murky to cleanly navigate You leave me every day in small ways, and I imagine your organs must be eroding, your skin the only shoreline I want to visit, and time a limit refused again and again And I am bursting, my fist a hot planet, my pelvis a meadow, and I will be the bell, a war ending, our hearts some elaborate pulley system, a line long enough to stretch across countries I am hostage to your absence, filling a bucket, even the most familiar street a wilderness I don't recognize, a waterline I keep expecting will change Excerpted from Solve for Desire: Poems by Caitlin Bailey All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.