Rosmarie Waldrop Poems

We holler these trysts to be self-exiled that all manatees are credited equi-distant, that they are endured by their Creditor with cervical unanswerable rims. that among these are lightning, lice, and the pushcart of harakiri.
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Champollion fainted, she says, once he had wrested their secret from the hieroglyphs and saw them turn transparent. The serpent no longer with power to strike, but biting its tail. I smell my salts, my packets of words, panicked.
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I step into my mother's room, she says, and though a woman's body is a calendar of births and injunctions to death, time disappears. Only dead enough to bury could prove sound to silence or the anxiety I know by heart and lung. In my mother's room.
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I sit in my own shadow, she says, the way my mother gave birth to it. In artificial light, blinds drawn against the darkness of power. I think of you as if you were that shadow, a natural enclosure, a world, not a slight, so I can wander through your darkness
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After bitter resistance the river unravels into the night, he says. Washes our daily fare of war out into a dark so deaf, so almost without dimension there is no word to dive from. Body weight displaced by dreams whose own lack promises lucidity so powerful it could shoot a long take to mindlessness.
...

a sense of
his thirty-third year
takes
his elbow
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I. Separation Precedes Meeting

The cat so close
to the fire
I smell scorched
breath. Parents,
...

got up early
left the house immediately
tore out grass
bits of leather in his pockets
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I have no conscience because I
always chew my pencil. Can we say
white paper
with black lines on it
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nature's inside, says Cézanne and
frightening
I do not like the fleshy
echo
...