Lucie Brock-Broido Biography

Winter was the ravaging in the scarified
Ghost garden, a freak of letters crossing down a rare

Path bleak with poplars. Only the yew were a crewel
...

No feeding on wisteria. No pitch-burner traipsing
In the nettled woods. No milk in metal cylinders, no
Buttering. No making small contusions on the page
But saying nothing no one has not said before.
No milkweed blown across your pony-coat, no burrs.
No scent of juniper on your Jacobean mouth. No crush
Of ink or injury, no lacerating wish.
Extinguish me from this.
I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost
And flickering in unison with all the other fireflies in Appalachia,
Blinking in the swarm of it, and all at once, above
And on a bare branch in a shepherd's sky. No Dove.
There is no thou to speak of.
...

If my own voice falters, tell them hubris was my way of adoring you.
The hollow of the hulk of you, so feverish in life, cut open,

Reveals ten thousand rags of music in your thoracic cavity.
The hands are received bagged and examination reveals no injury.

Winter then, the body is cold to the touch, unplunderable,
Kept in its drawer of old-world harrowing.

Teeth in fair repair. Will you be buried where; nowhere.

Your mouth a globe of gauze and glossolalia.
And opening, most delft of blue,
Your heart was a mess—

A mob of hoofprints where the skittish colts first learned to stand,
Catching on to their agility, a shock of freedom, wild-maned.

The eyes have hazel irides and the conjunctivae are pale,

With hemorrhaging. One lung, smaller, congested with rose smoke.
The other, filled with a swarm of massive sentimentia.

I adore you more. I know
The wingspan of your voice, whole gorgeous flock of harriers,

Cannot be taken down. You would like it now, this snow, this hour.
Your visitation here tonight not altogether unexpected.

The night-laborers, immigrants all, assemble here, aching for to speaking,
Longing for to work.
...

Green as alchemy and even more scarce, little can be known
Of the misfortunes of a saint condemned to turn great sorrows

Into greater egrets, ice-bound and irrevocable. The wings were left ajar
At the altar where I've knelt all night, trembling, leaning, rough

As sugar raw, and sweet. From the outside, peering in, it would seem
My life had been smooth as a Prussian ship gliding on the bridegroom

Of her Baltic waters in a season of no wind. Tinny empire,

Neighborhood of Bokhara silks, were you to go, I would stop—simply
As a pilgrim putting down his cup. Most of my life,

I had consorted with the unspeakable, longing to put my mouth
On it. I was just imagining. I can be

Resumed. Some nights, I paint into the scene two Doves,
I being alternately one and then the other, calling myself by my kind.

In the living will if it says: Hydrate. Please.
Hydration only. Do not resume me then.
...

No exquisite instruments.

No dead coming back as wrens in rooms at dawn.

No suicidal hankering; no hankering for suicide.

No one thousand days.

No slim luck for the only President I ever loved.

No lukewarm bath in oatmeal.

No lantern left for Natalie on the way home from school in her Alaskan dark.

No eye.

No Victorian slippers that walked the bogs to moor.

No Donner bones with cuts on them or not.

No horizontal weeping; no weeping vertically.

No flipping back your black tails at the black piano bench.

No Elgar, no Tallis, no post-industrial despair.

No French kissing in the field of wild raspberry and thorn.

No commissioned urn.

No threat. In the table of contents I'm not dead yet.
...