by Sarah Arvio
The Rose
You took me
in the bloom of my life
& unbloomed me
not the unbloom
of deflower
or the
denude of undress
I was dropping
my petals
& saying
yes yes
There are only
so many petals
they won’t last & last
& the hub of the flower
is as bald as a bone
& now I am
the node of disarray
the nub of despair
I was love & beauty
I was plucked in a pose
I was taken from a posy
I was not loved I was loathed
Bed
I haven’t got a fingernail or bed
or even the bed of a fingernail
and I was hoping that you were the nail
that would hang me up on the joy wall
and I was hoping you were the finger
that would point me toward the rainbow
as the rain bowed and slashed and all
the colors stood still in the singing wind
I haven’t got a mailbox or a box
for my files or my fingernail filings
I haven’t got a box of photographs
or a graph of the days of rage and pain
or only on my heart which hurts me
I haven’t got a file to cut off the chain
or a ring I wanted a ring and a song
a bed with a head a heart and a soul
though there are so many places to sleep
I have to say you hit the nail on the head
and that was my nail and my head and now
I am dead there are so many places to sleep
I have fallen from the joy wall and died
Hard Place
I won’t leap off the edge though people do
and how sad it is for all of us
that they didn’t know how to live
when life was so full of all of life
which is what life is full of always
for when it is full of something else
something like ugliness or lies
then it’s also life but not life
and this is a distinction hard to make
like a rock and a hard place
and the rock would be for leaping from
and the hard place for staying in
if staying can be said of hardness
or leaping can be said of rocks
and all I wanted was to be rocked
to be soothed and rocked in a hard place
and it isn’t the hardness that does it
there is nothing that is hard in soothing
it should be easy but is hard to find
it should be soft soothing should be soft
even in a hard place this is the truth
there is no place as hard as a rock
and nothing as soothing as rocking
and this is one of the paradoxes
that come to the hardest of lives
from the softest of thoughts
there’s no place so hard as a hard place
Some Hand
I saw him go out handsome in his suit
in his shoes and suit so handsome
he was hiding something in his hand
when he turned and went and he said
I’m going now I said will you give me
a hand and he was walking out in his shoes
and his summer suit into the spring day
and I thought he feels better today he’s
wearing his lovely linen summer suit
it suits him and so do his shoes and then
I went upstairs and I saw in his room
that the suitcases were gone and so were
his hands and some of his clothes and
some of his shoes and some of I didn’t
know what It’s shoe in and shoe out
handsome devil with something in his hand
and it’s the soft touch of the nest of
his hand or it’s the tough stuff in the stuff
of his hand and I said will you give me your
shoe and he said sure and hit me on the head
with the shoe and sure it didn’t hurt it was
barely a slipper this was a slip-on and slip-off
this was the soft sole of the dapper world
Tap-tap dap-dap or dip down I kept saying
why don’t you dip down into your deep self
and tell me why you’re so handsome and why
so devilishly angry there’s a story there
but it doesn’t suit you to say what it was
and now you’ve got your hand on the knob
in your dapper suit off into the spring day
Go & Go
one person in the universe
can be the universe
one turn or one verse
like turning over in bed
or turning in a dance
the unique & united
one niche of your life
the one single hub
of your universe
the unicycle that wants
another wheel
or the cyclonic
disruption of all the lines
the body flying off the cycle
& rolling on the road
oh pour me some please
a big unison drink
a big gulp for two of us
staring in one glass
as the cycle turns
& each turn says
life love life love life love
a niche or a nest
in one old bed or old tree
all the arms going up
& stretching in sleep
& all going around
like branches in a wind
all go up in the end
all go down
they go down in the end
they go & go in the end
Sponge
Soul like a dirty sponge that soaked up all the dark bits
from yours all messed up and mixed in
with the dirt of the days the old hairs and hatefulness
Oh my god I knew there was hate in the human world
but I didn’t know it was the job of my soul
to clean it up How can I clean it up if my soul
is the sponge sponging it up In the end it doesn’t
go anywhere except into my dirtier and dirtier soul
And I say well crying will clean it up but then I’m
bent over crying because my beautiful sponge of a soul
that lay in the depths of a cool warm aquablue tropical
sea with little fishes flitting about in their exquisite
jewel colors and rays of sunshine raying through
has been used to sop up an angry man’s leftover
cruelty Yes cruel does sound like jewel and there
should be a jewelty How can I squeeze it out I’ll
need a new sponge but I can’t throw out my soul and if
each tear is one drop of an aquablue tropical sea
maybe I can cry back my sea It’s not so easy
to clean a soul some say weeks and some say centuries
acknowledgments
Love and thanks to the late Mark Strand, the late C. K. Williams, Edward Hirsch, Page Starzinger, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Dennis Nurkse, John Koethe, Alice Quinn, and above all
others, my editor, Deborah Garrison.
Thanks to Victoria Pearson and Todd Portnowitz.
Appreciations to Janet Hansen and Pei Loi Koay.
Special thanks to Roy Skodnick and Frank Gillette.
I would also like to honor here the late Ralph Angel and the late Leslie Wolf, my first poetry teachers.
Thanks to Jesse Littlejohn.
Special thanks to the editors who published these poems, some in earlier versions:
“Algarve” in TriQuarterly, final print issue
“Animal,” “Gosling,” “Rat Idyll,” “Shrew,” and “Small War” in the Boston Review, winners of the 2008 Boston Review annual poetry contest; “Small War” and “Animal” also on Poetry Daily (poems.com); and “Animal” on howapoemhappens.blogspot.com
“Bed” on Plume (plumepoetry.com)
“Bodhisattva” on Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day (poets.org) and in The Best American Poetry 2015
“Handbag,” “Neck,” and “Wood” in The New Yorker; “Wood” in The Broadview Introduction to Literature and in its Concise and Poetry editions
“Sage” and “Whorl” in The New Republic; “Sage” also on bestamericanpoetry.com; “Whorl” in Laberinto, the Milenio cultural supplement, translated into Spanish by Víctor Manuel Mendiola as “Espiral”
“Red Dress” in The New York Review of Books
“Wreck” in Knopf’s Poem-a-Day
a note about the author
Sarah Arvio, the author of night thoughts: 70 dream poems & notes from an analysis, Sono: Cantos, and Visits from the Seventh, and the translator of Federico García Lorca (Poet in Spain), is a recipient of the Rome Prize and Bogliasco, Guggenheim, and NEA fellowships, among other honors. For many years a translator for the United Nations in New York and Switzerland, she has also taught at Princeton and Columbia. She lives in New York City.
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