Diane Seuss Poems

No one says Paris anymore.
There's no such thing as Paris, no
Café de la Paix, no Titian's Entombment
in the Louvre or Hotel La Sanguin
...

There is a force that breaks the body, inevitable,
the by-product is pain, unexceptional as a rain
gauge, which has become arcane, rhyme, likewise,
unless it's assonant or internal injury, gloom, joy,
which is also a dish soap, but not the one that rids
seabirds of oil from wrecked tankers, that's Dawn,
which should change its name to Dusk, irony being
the flip side of sentimentality here in the Iron Age,
ironing out the kinks in despair, turning it to hairdo
from hair, to do, vexing infinitive, much better to be
pain's host, body of Christ as opposed to the Holy
Ghost, when I have been suffering at times I could
step away from it by embracing it, a blues thing,
a John Donne thing, divest by wrestling, then sing.
...

What is it you feel I asked Kurt when you listen to
Ravel's String Quartet in F-major, his face was so lit up
and I wondered, "the music is unlike the world I live
or think in, it's from somewhere else, unfamiliar and unknown,
not because it is relevant to the familiar and comfortable,
but because it brings me to that place that I didn't/couldn't
imagine existed. And sometimes that unfamiliar place is closer
to my world than I realize, and sometimes it's endlessly distant,"
that's what he wrote in an email when I asked him
to remind me what he'd said earlier, off the cuff, "I don't
recall exactly what I said," he began, a sentence written
in iambic pentameter, and then the rest, later he spoke of two
of his brothers who died as children, leukemia and fire,
his face, soft, I'm listening to Ravel now, its irrelevancy.
...

The barber, with his mug of warm foam, his badger-hair brush.

My mother and sister and me and the dog, leashed with a measure
of anchor rope, in the hospital parking lot, waving good-bye
to my father from his window on the 7th floor.

Just him and his tumor, rare as the Hope Diamond,
and his flimsy paper cup half-filled with infirmary water.

The lump in my throat, a tea party cup left in the garage all winter,
holding the silver body and wing dust of a dead moth.

The barber, sweeping the day's worth of hair into the basement,
remembering how he'd traveled to Memorial
to lather the face of the dying man and shave him smooth
in his raised hospital bed and sometimes he shaved the faces
of the dead as a favor to the mortician.

Wondering how this particular life was the life that had been chosen for him.

The barber, walking home in the dark
to a late supper of torn bread in a cup of heavy cream.

Even the mayor's wife sipping from a teacup
wreathed in Banded Peacock butterflies wonders, in her loneliness,
why me? Why this cup?
...

If there's pee on the seat it's my pee,
battery's dead I killed it, canary at the bottom
of the cage I bury it, like God tromping the sky
...

and not the calf though it licked me with its tongue
covered in taste buds like barnacles. I'd sleep with my head
on its warm side. Pretend to sleep. Pretend to like to be alone
...

but needed to see anyway, they'd put on their work
gloves and grab a bat sleeping upside down in the attic
and hold it still so we'd have to look at its small eyes
...

Fingernail against zipper.
Apple covered in bees.
It's none of my business unless I'm the apple.
...

Not just cawing but full trills, music rising like swells
on a windy ocean, each bird a chip off of some
brilliantly-colored abstraction, beaks gold as trumpets
...

are nougat but there is something
else though not so sweet, no merging,
no synchrony of watches but a kind of—
...