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
...

Don't do that when you are dead like this, I said,
Arguably still squabbling about the word inarguably.
I haunt Versailles, poring through the markets of the medieval.
Mostly meat to be sold there; mutton hangs
...

What was it I was hungry about. Hunger, it is one
Of the several contraptions I can turn on the off-button to at will.

Yes, yes, of course it is an "Art." Of course I will not be here
Long, not the way the percentages are going now.
...

Where is your father whose eye you were the apple of?

Where are your mother's parlor portieres, her slip-covered days, her petticoats?

In the orchard at the other end of  time, you were just a child in ballet slippers,

Your first poodle skirt, your tortoiseshell barrettes. As the peach tree grew more

Scarce each day, you kept running out to try to tape the leaves back on their boughs.

Once, I caught you catch a pond of sunlight in your lap and when you stood,

The sunlight spilt; it could never follow you. Once, above the river,

You told me you were born to be a turtle, swimming down. Under the bridge

Now you take your meals where the thinnest creatures live at the end

Of the world. Carpe Demon, you told me just before you put down the phone

And drank the antifreeze. This year, the winter sky in Missouri is a kind of cold

The color of a turtle's hood, a soup of dandelion, burdock root, and clay.
...

And to the curious I say, Don't be naïve.

The soul, like a trinket, is a she.

I lay down in the tweed of one man that first frost night.

I did not like the wool of  him.

You have one mitochondrial speck of evidence on your cleat.

They can take you down for that.

Did I forget to mention that when you're dead

You're dead a long time.

My uncle, dying, told me this when asked,

Why stay here for such suffering.

A chimney swift flits through the fumatorium.

I long for one last Blue democracy,

Which has broke my heart a while.

How many minutes have I left, the lover asked,

To still be beautiful?

I took his blond face in my hands and kissed him blondly

On his mouth.
...