Averill Curdy Poems

Never the bark and abalone mask
cracked by storms of a mastering god,
never the gods' favored glamour, never
the pelagic messenger bearing orchards
in its beak, never allegory, not wisdom
or valor or cunning, much less hunger
demanding vigilance, industry, invention,
or the instinct to claim some small rise
above the plain and from there to assert
the song of another day ending;
lentil brown, uncounted, overlooked
in the clamorous public of the flock
so unlikely to be noticed here by arrivals,
faces shining with oils of their many miles,
where it hops and scratches below
the baggage carousel and lights too high,
too bright for any real illumination,
looking more like a fumbled punch line
than a stowaway whose revelation
recalls how lightly we once traveled.
...

Until wolf-light I will count my sheep,
Adumbrated, uncomedic, as they are.
One is perdu, two, qualm, three
Is sprawl, four, too late,

Night is already a thirsty county in Texas,
Salt flat and unremitting
Blacktop dry as my mouth,
And your elastic vowels, my genial,

My electric ghost, my
Radio's lonely station. Because the spectacle
Of suffering corrupts us, all punishments
Are now executive, offstage.

Most presume you a fable:
Echoes of approaching bootheels
That harry labyrinths of concrete corridors,
Or hooded in burlap.

We are convicted
As we are also pardoned: He cherished
His lawn, or afterwards he covered
The victim's face. You make no judgments

Yourself. Only in bursal tones,
Tactful as the file box
That shows, if opened, the neon, pleading heart
Of Jesus wrapped in barbed wire,

You perform penalties others have scripted, so
Untroubled by so many.
How long I have listened to you
For news of the opal distances,

Or rain to freshen the morning's arrival.
What keeps me awake? Nothing
More than a fly's dysenteric violin.
What puts me to sleep

Is your clement voice, saying
The dark has no teeth. While men like you live
In this world do I dream
I am either safe or spared?
...

For Audrey Richardson Curdy (1931-1986)
It was 1986, when currencies to be changed
Into multiple-launch-surface, anti-tank missiles
Swarmed through numbered bank accounts
Like Ovid's seething knotted seed of frog-slime,
Which not seldome attracted by the sun falls
In little frogs with the rain; when it also rained
Radionuclides, strontium, caesium, & iodine,
Over river & clay, & over the poet's Black Sea
Exile, before the prevailing winds blew them all
Across Europe from Chernobyl (jewel of a name
That means black stalks & tasted newly of metal),
& I was in your room trying to build a fire.
Wet branches breaking, those were your breaths
Ripped out of the air. What was it hiding you
So that at every hour's dusk I startled on you
Where you lay, nearly resigned in the talons
Of your most personal shape? Something still
Obdurate, still wild as the horned lark
Rising from its nest at the hunter's feet.
I didn't allow you to speak what I didn't know
To ask. As far as the bolted iron door to adust
I could have followed, to watch the way
You put on your flame like sweetness
Wearing the skin of a lion, & there kept
My vigil mild while bones leached minerals
& cell walls ruptured. It isn't you
Curled like a seed of storm-pine in a furrow
Of ash, but your same small jeweled hand
Belonging to a Roman matron that I see,
Its livid reach forth the black igneous rock.
Too late to retrieve the truth, too late not to
Have been like the alchemist who, lowered by rope
Into the volcano, feeling the sharp concussion
Of heat, reported his own eyes saw olive groves
& sky, mountains, & rivers of water & fire.
What can I make of this? Oh, what am I to make?
...

You lean disconsolate on your stool,
Sullen and certain

As minor royalty rusticated to this
Unhelpful climate of solvents, gaskets, pliers, and bolts.

Because they are new and manifold and useful

You feel their whispers against you. The staunch
Resistance of objects. How can I tell you
O my soul,

To exhaust the realm of the possible when
Ever the light
Is uncongenial as February and your hand unlovely?

Like a dog nearly annihilated by nerves
And boredom chewing her paw to sore, red velvet,

You've torn your nails so far flesh swells
Closed around each bed like an eyeless socket.

That you should be making such small change!

Fingers inarticulate as moles nudge a debris
Of dimes not thick enough to hide

The candy-colored butterfly flaring
Across the tender, veined delta of your hand

Heralding indelibly the eviction
Of this vulgar flesh

Or the one word needled in black, knuckle-Gothic
R a p t u r e
...

L'ange Anatomique, by Jacques-Fabien Gautier d'Agoty, 1746
Unfastened avidly from each ivory button
of her spine, the voluntary muscles open
virtuosities of red: Cinnabar

the mutagen, and carmine from cochineal
born between fog and frost, so many little
deaths Buddhists refuse to wear

robes soaked in its thousands. Sunsets
of other centuries fade in galleries to ash.
Red is fugitive: As the voice, the blow

of gravity along a nerve opening to an ache
the body can't unhouse: As the carnation
suffusing cheek and haunch like saucers

from the king's porcelain rinsed in candlelight.
Gratuitous as the curl, the urn-shaped torso,
the pensive, brimming gaze of pretty

post-coital thought she half-turns over one
excavated shoulder. As if to see herself
in a mirror's savage theater as elegy

to the attempt to fill an exhausted form,
to learn again the old ordeals of wound
and hand and eye. To find the source of burning.
...

He is a voice of shipwrecked marble,
greened and shattered statuary,
shouting pop songs to the morning.
Clothed in his exhausted changes,
cardigans moulting over rickracked
black skirt over broker's ruined suit,
which clings to him in another's shape,
he looks halfway from human.
There is nothing else he can do;
but bandage his dreads in knit caps,
bind in wool his arms and shins
against the delirium, insistent, delicate,
terrible, as a campaign of ants. He touches
his blind eyes, their leaking meats,
his lips, groin, last year's broken hip,
to constellate himself for the straits
of evening's rest. Hearing him sing
the songs of seven generations,
of hillbillies, castaways, mavericks,
we, the dying, who wait impatient
beside him, by our understanding
are comforted, soothed by his vision
of those green acres. Before him
a bus's pneumatic doors groan open,
like an old priest climbing to his knees
without conviction, and with a gesture
archaic as the lavish waste of new
vintages poured out onto dirt, the smoke
of pleasure and of sacrifice, the singer
cups his hands saying, fitfully, nothing.
The sweatshop-racket of cicadas,
a bird's two-note diminuendo like
a dog tied up outside, bluebottles purring
their little flesh-songs, decay and repair
—in the wind small things also cry.
...

Roused, as breath my sleep had
seized returns—a pink bud swelling
like a peony from this lizard's throat.
As mate or threat, what strange excess
translated from some foreign grammar
of ornament. Poised on my laptop
he looks like evolution's little scar,
the digital evergreen of midnight
currency transfers and failing pulses,
ceaseless milt and molt of information.
Though his elbows jut like epaulettes
and an azure eye patch surrounds each
obsidian, mordant bead, revolving
separate, he isn't miniature or minaudière,
not toy or clown, but a philosopher-king
catechizing the rough or honeyed skin
of things. Head swiveling imperially,
he picks unseen locks, but can't escape
his nature, all zeroes and ones, void
or integer as god. Being, then watching,
then gone, withdrawn to his peripheries,
returned to that alert, invisible world.
I raise my sleep-numb arm and shed
its thousand scales, my fused bones
lightening, fraying to feathers, to fingers
that begin the day's unraveling.
...