Once again, someone falls in their first falling — fall of the two bodies, of the two eyes, of four green eyes or eight green eyes if we count those born in the mirror (at midnight, in the purest fear, in loss), you haven't been able to recognize the voice of your dull silence, to behold the earthly messages scrawled in the middle of one mad state, when the body is a glass and from ourselves and from the other we drink some sort of impossible water. Desire needlessly spills on me a cursed liqueur. For my thirsting thirst, what can the promise of contact with your eyes do? I speak of something not in this world. I speak of someone whose purpose is elsewhere. And I was naked in memory of the white night. Drunk, and I made love all night, just like a sick dog. Sometimes we suffer too much reality in the space of a single night. We get undressed, we're horrified. We're aware the mirror sounds like a watch, the mirror from which your cry will pour out, your laceration. Night opens itself only once. It's enough. You see. You've seen. Fear of being two in the mirror, and suddenly we're four. We cry, we sob, my fear, my joy more horrible than my fear, my obscene words, my words which are keys locking me into a mirror, with you, but ever alone. I know the nature of night. We've fallen so completely into jaws which couldn't fathom this sacrifice, this condemnation of my seeing eyes. I speak of a discovery: felt the I in sex, sex in the I. I speak of burying everyday fear to secure the fear of an instant. The abyss of absence. But who'll say: don't cry at night? Because madness is a lie too. Like night. Like death.
Read Ripatrazone's reviews of Paisley Rekdal's Nightingale, Tina Chang's Hybrida, Tess Gallagher's Is, Is Not, Natalie Scenters-Zapico's Lima :: Limón, Etal Adnan's Time, and David Ebenbach's Some Unimaginable Animal. via THE MILLIONS
WHAT SPARKS POETRY: BRIAN TEARE ON GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS’ “AS KINGFISHERS CATCH FIRE” "I remember the moment I learned words could record the reciprocal press of poet upon the world and the world upon poet. A truant undergraduate student, I had signed up late for a “Modern British Poetry” course, and came to the second class unprepared. The assigned reading was Gerard Manley Hopkins."
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