Rebecca Wolff Poems

There is a curiosity that knows
I know

deathless ceiling of unknowing
...

I can play songs in my head
Yes I can perfectly replicate

(the) full-on
orchestral
every note
(when the lights / do down / in the city)
yet I cannot

compose, for example

and though when I was young I believed

that the fullness meant
I could recreate the sounds
I heard in my head with my mouth

I learned through painful iteration
painfully unsatisfactory

shameful the rendition

so partial
almost unrelated
the qualities are: note tone scale register vocality musicality
incapacity
painfully shy of representation
is there anyone?

who is a record player
...

Careening over the
highway in
my lightweight
Japanese
Death Star
buffeted by the great and powerful
winds

icy winds
of winter warming
cold air with hot air
under it

accordion pleats
of natural disaster
my disaster

in the past if you were to say to me

or to rage at me
in a poem
about America I would charge you
a great failure

to even use the word. It is
banality
this land is suffering because poets—

their great cohort—


I look twice
to save lives.
...

there are some things up there
uptown

I want to see

I want to see I'm going to look at that and see

I want to go up and see

that show. That show

I went to see, I went to see.

There are some things up

there uptown

I want to

look at that and see. I'm going to see

what I look. What I look at, when I look, vessel,

I stood to see. I went to stand to look

to see. Venturing further I went outside myself to look
at that wall. It fed! There was a box inside that was not blank, I saw it.
It was really different from an aura, the thing had

colors, the thing was talking

to itself. And spoke

to me, not incidentally.
...

Let's go out and buy something. In the sun.

No, let's stay home and make something, the sun floods the room. It
could be green, on paper. It could be money. That's the way to create
new matter.

That's how I detach boats from moorings—my boat, my mooring—
the harbor
shallow in low tide

skiff propelled over buffeting sands flats on

sheer
puissance.
...

because you're psychic
no one else could understand me
the way you

do and

I say
Drink Me

I say it to you silently
but it calls forth in me

the water for you
the water you asked for
...

I'd like a
lidless

Vicodin.
Oblivion.

Countless
sensation of him

leaving the room.
Come back soon.

It occurred to me
fait accompli.

Clinamen.
Phantom limb.

Black cat sleeping
(you used to be

next to me)
next to me

dreams our lost
telepathy.
...

I stopped by to see you but you were not home

marshland

the pure vision

my ancient lives all risen up and rising



shudder in my bed to come up against

a living religion; they get offended so easily;

blow up your hundred-foot Buddha

no problem. Entire mountainside.



Presumably it's an improvement

on whatever came before

on what was here before

ancestral crypt your daddy built; a grassy hill; a patchwork quilt;
inadequately warming.
...

Half a day is dead already-
a lady with a baby in the shady graveyard
promenade not quite the idea
but the first idea to be impressed
so firmly- Grace to be born

in the
bisected quadrangle
stones propped insensible
but all in relation
to the babe.

Babe what suckles
babe what grows comfortable with thieves in a fertile
bed of unsaid
slice of eponymous
grafted to the reef

Hold my hand
in the undergrowth
waist high at your leisure cheerful
child of melancholy and displeasure.
Soft in the lap you grow

hard at the breast- Oh
under- and aboveground we go
to relieve us. Camphor
and cambric by the hand not by halves,
one turn more

will take us back to where we rest.
Baby is not baby when she
wears her oblong
freshet
I will take her home to rest.
...

He died before we could honor
him correctly. Candied

impulse through the brain.
Your will subverted

that's a tree, a treatment,
a genealogy. Oddly enough if I need something

someone is sure to give it to me.
To supply me with it. Oddly enough,

it's not about cutting slack
but about positive reinforcement

Detergent in the sense that it is

emergent

deterrent
where the nascent

meets the latent
I put my tongue in the path

dug up some chestnuts.
"We'll keep looking

for a place for you
inside of nature"

I can't remember how I died.
Writing something down at the time

the grave had been disturbed.
Next thing you know, I'm making

an entry in my diary: No use
letting it get cold.
...