Hera Lindsay Bird
Page 2
Like two lonely scholars in the dark clefts of the Cyrillic alphabet.
Like an ancient star slowly getting sucked into a black hole.
So hard we break sports, leaving the conveners of the Olympics
with a generous redundancy package.
You are a denim tree and I’m the world’s fastest autumn.
I am the Atlantic Fortress, and you are General Sherman
taking me from behind.
You stride into council chambers, waving a petition to orgasm.
A lip of cloud brushes the roof of the barn.
The pale trees curve around the eye and back into the brain.
It’s like watching porn through a kaleidoscope
or a slow wind in a kite factory.
Like dogs trying to do it people-style, but failing due to the inflexibility of their anatomical structure.
A cloud of bats float slowly up into your brain rafters.
You roll down my stockings, like the sun peeling ocean from a Soviet globe.
I want you in a seventeenth-century field, tilling the earth like flesh tractors.
In the red shade of a mammoth
in the Natural History Museum.
In the airlock of a space station, my heart shaking like an epileptic star.
Between the plastic sheets of a lobotomy table
because writing poetry about fucking
when you could be fucking
is the last refuge of the stupid.
It’s like getting three wishes and wishing for less wishes.
It’s like designing a flag the exact same colour as the sky.
It’s like crying over spilled milk before it’s out of the cow.
It’s like breaking into a field at dawn
and euthanising the cow so you can get your crying over and done with
and immediately begin adjusting to your new lactose-free existence.
But love isn’t really like killing cattle
no matter what poetry wants us to believe.
The day is a vault the sun has cracked open
money flying everywhere like really expensive leaves
and here I am begging you to come back
as if you were already gone
HAVING SEX IN A FIELD IN 2013
Is the title of this poem, but it’s also a true story about being in love
I am in love with you
While one bird feeds another bird right next to me
they throw their shadows into my life
like black sugar
I love to feel this bad because it reminds me of being human
I love this life too
Every day something new happens and I think
so this is the way things are now
I thought that as a stranger put his tongue between my legs
in the first hour of the New Year
and again as I woke
to a field of slow blowing trees
and right now telling you
Friends, I love everything new
even the first days of heartbreak
when everything beautiful is set alight
the glass fur of the cactus
birds on fire with wonder
I have done many things in my life
I have talked to many people
Some of these people have called me very drunk at one in the morning
These people are my best friends
They are like miles of snow to me
When I listen to my voicemail
I can hear one of them saying
Did she just hang up on us
IF YOU ARE AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PHARAOH
I am carving dirty hieroglyphics
into the wall of your tomb
If you are a dead French aristocrat
I am the suspicious circumstances
surrounding your death
If you are a shape-shifting wizard
I am the shape you are shifting into
If you are a fast-moving cloud
I am an entire field of deer
looking up
If you are a sceptical cop
I am a haunted fax machine
If you are a catapult
I am the medieval knight
you are catapulting
I fly over the dark fields of my enemies
corkscrewing the dawn
This is what missing you feels like
Without you
I am just the suspicious circumstances
surrounding nothing
Without you I am just
a regular medieval knight
settling ongoing tenancy disputes
and doing other knight-related activities
like dying thousands of years ago
I rise from the grave to lean
like an ancient wind against your house
Your roof a red eyelid
closed against the sky
When I’m not with you I am like
a lonely wrestler with nobody to break chairs on
When you take off your clothes
the whole room darkens to light you
Your nakedness a pale kite
I want to take you to the river that runs behind my house
and show you where the dark water vanishes between the rocks
but I can’t
because nothing runs behind my house
not even a lonely commercial highway
I want to stand with you
on the edge of a lonely commercial highway
waiting for the jumper cables
that will restart this engine
and take us somewhere far beyond
the confines of this poem
I need to have a reason
for the aisles of trees we sailed through
and your hand on my knee in reckless disregard
of road safety recommendations
I need to have a reason
for so many nights of watching you recede from me,
like the ass end of a horse
in the credits of a Western
I need to have a reason
for drinking beer in your parents’ swimming pool at night
and how you lay face down in the water
like a body in a celestial crime scene
The stars so many knives
in the small of your back
HATE
Some people are meant to be forgiven
and others are meant to be hated forever ............................
....................................................................................................................
I don’t think it’s right to hate people
It’s just that I don’t care
To wake each day in a snakeskin negligee
and light myself on fire with such ethical behaviours
Once ............................ I tried to give hate up
But I was born to feel a great pettiness
To lie face-down in my catholic schoolgirl outfit
and pound the cobblestones of the Royal Albert Hall
Hate is an old fashioned spirituality
To know that pain will take care of itself
It’s a lean justice that doesn’t serve anyone
Only itself, like a long retired butler
Well I don’t like life without a modicum of hate
This was once a righteous indignation
But now .......................................... it is a self pleasuring exercise
A literary revenge is the most humiliating of all punishments
To be stretched on the racks of the poetry industrial complex
Hate only hurts the hater, says conventional wisdom
But conventional wisdom’s dead and I am still alive
If this hurts, it hurts like self-inflicted ass slaps
Oh tell me I’m a bad girl, with a stunted empathy complex
Some people are meant to hate forever<
br />
and other people are meant to have appropriate reactions
Some people believe in forgiveness
and other people believe in .................... dwelling on things
Hate is a rare emotion, because nobody dares feel it
Nobody! ........................................................ at least not by name
Everyone thinks their hate is just wrong behaviour objections
But there are wrong behaviour objections and then there are
.......................... wrong behaviour objections
Hate is a white crêpe box, with voluminous spite ruffles
It’s a friendly push off a Tuscan cliff
Hate is a private joke, with only one punchline
or a statue in the courtyard with a Bad Attitude
To hate is to glory in bygone hurts
Like an antique canon you never have to load
My hate is a genial hate with ‘a modern-vintage aesthetic’
like clocking someone with a non-stick frying pan
As a child, my dance instructor once told me to stop rolling my eyes
I was very petulant, and accustomed to lavish praise
I’m not rolling my eyes, I said, I’m looking at the ceiling
And I was ........................................................ with modern jazz contempt
Hate is an emotional aristocracy fallen on hard times
It’s like eating nothing off a solid gold plate
To hate is a cruel vintage festivity
Like a hand-made piñata filled with bees
Hate is a luxurious futility, like a velvet birdbath
Someone wise once said that, and that person was me
And if you don’t like it .............................................................. well
buy me a drink and you can finish the poem
Once I tried to understand my enemy
But some people it is less eyerolling not to understand
To hate is a bad behaviour
But I have to feel it anyway
The more they want me less to hate them
The more I smile like a sickle coming down
& they’re the bad bad grass
I tell my hate to my girlfriend and she laughs
she laughs and laughs and laughs
she laughs until she cries at the ungenerous things I say
and then looks kind of worried ........................................................
CHILDREN ARE THE ORGASM OF THE WORLD
This morning on the bus there was a woman carrying a bag with inspirational sayings and positive affirmations which I was reading because I’m a fan of inspirational sayings and positive affirmations. I also like clothing that gives you advice. What’s better than the glittered baseball cap of a stranger telling you what to strive for? It’s like living in a world of therapists. The inspirational bag of the woman on the bus said a number of things like ‘live in the moment’ and ‘remember to breathe’ but it also said ‘children are the orgasm of the world’. Are children the orgasm of the world like orgasms are the orgasms of sex? Are children the orgasm of anything? Children are the orgasm of the world like hovercraft are the orgasm of the future or silence is the orgasm of the telephone, or shit is the orgasm of the lasagne. You could even say sheep are the orgasm of lonely pastures, which are the orgasm of modern farming practices which are the orgasm of the industrial revolution. And then I thought why not? I like comparing things to other things too. Like sometimes when we’re having sex and you look like a helicopter in a low-budget movie, disappearing behind a cloud to explode. Or an athlete winning a prestigious sporting tournament at the exact moment he realises his wife has been cheating on him. For the most part, orgasms are the orgasms of the world. Like slam-dunking a glass basketball. Or executing a perfect dive into a swimming pool full of oh my god. Or travelling into the past to forgive yourself and creating a time paradox so complex it forces all of human history to reboot, stranding you naked on some rocky outcrop, looking up at the sunset from a world so new looking up hasn’t even been invented yet.
WILD GEESE BY MARY OLIVER
BY HERA LINDSAY BIRD
You do not have to be good
is everything you deserve for taking
relationship advice from a flock of migratory birds.
Even in poetry I forgive you nothing
not even your new empire of grief.
You take off your dress and stand in the river
your body a ghost on loan
from someone else’s past.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile in a hospital gown
Meanwhile in a long-dead language
Meanwhile every morning, the stars in tatters on the snow
Meanwhile the library of Alexandria burning in alphabetical order
Meanwhile an asterisk blowing across the screen like tumbleweed
Meanwhile in the lining of the uterine wall
Meanwhile in hyperbole
Meanwhile every day for the rest of our lives
I return here to ask you how to forgive someone
who was never mine to forgive.
You do not have to be good
Being good isn’t even the point anymore.
I just don’t think it’s real
to think of geese and feel so beautiful about yourself
and so far away.
Yesterday my girlfriend and I borrowed a car
and drove down through the valley
where my mother almost starved herself to death thirty years ago
a huge silver wind blowing in from the sea.
What do I care if there is no justice in this world?
Life is hard
and pain is hard
and it’s hard for me to write plainly
about the night my girlfriend told me she still loved you
and call it art.
It did not feel like art.
It did not feel like a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
It did not feel like a broken wheel backwards into the sea
But it hurt me.
It still hurts me
Even now
The shadow of new leaves trembling the carpet.
Oh Mary
How will we survive ourselves
And will this life ever answer?
I don’t know
Panic and awe are the same to me.
I love life
and I hate death
so when you try to describe to me
what it feels like to want to die
I can only look at you
Like you are a slow-burning planet
And I am pouring water through a telescope.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to be anything.
This is not an anthem for the world.
This life is a hard life and
It crushes people
But it’s also weird and full of heat
Crocodiles asleep in their red tent of hunger.
Puzzle pieces blown up the street
On the road outside the house
We sold all our things and moved south for.
It was winter and we were so in love
Sitting on the floor of her grandmother’s flat
watching the news roll in
about the woman who had been chained
for seven years in someone’s basement
And just got free.
The next morning we packed all our things
and headed south.
As if it were that easy.
As if there were anywhere to arrive
We could ever return from.
BISEXUALITY
‘There’s such a thing as too much sexual freedom ....’
Heidegger wrote that and he was bisexual too
always naked on a black leash, scrubbing the telephone
&n
bsp; You think My heart is a shanty town ... with fur curtains blowing
It’s like turning your back on God ........... but in a risqué halter neck
Like a rocking horse at auction you go to the highest bidder
You want to come home, but your home was destroyed in the war ....
And carefully refurbished, with an elegant leopard trim
The men are bad, and the girls ....................... are worse bad
Each day you wake up and have to be the wife again
To be a woman to a woman, is a female double-jointedness
Your heart a black salt lick, in an elk-laden pasture
To be bisexual is to be out of office, even to yourself
Like a rare sexual Narnia and no spring in sight
They won’t let you out of the closet to get back in again
Deep in the winter coats, a little snow starts falling ...
Everyone assumes you want to fuck them ......... and they’re right
but you’re also bad girl, with a kinky .... goodbye fetish
Always bursting into tears in the hotel lobby!
Gliding off in a taxi, with a briefcase full of military secrets
It’s hard to know what bisexuality means
It just ....... comes over you, like an urban sandstorm
When a fish crawls up onto land?—that’s bisexuality
It’s an ancient sexual amphibiousness
It’s like climbing out of a burning building into too much water
Or climbing out of a burning building .......
into a second identical burning building
Why does everything have to be so on fire? you ask yourself
But when you look down, your fretwork is smoking
Not the well of loneliness, more like a water feature
But a tasteful one, with a hidden power supply
You look out over the hills and the rows of red houses
And worst of all, you don’t even like softball!!!
THE EX-GIRLFRIENDS ARE BACK
FROM THE WILDERNESS
The ex-girlfriends are back ...
emerging once again from the tree shadows ...
into the primordial burlesque of autumn
with their low-cut ...
reminiscences ... and soft, double ironies ...
trembling once again into their
opulent ...
seasonal migration patterns
a corsage of wilting apologies
tethered to the bust ...
The ex-girlfriends are back ... with their
hand-beaded inconsistencies ...
& various unhappy motives ...