Cry Back My Sea

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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