Tag: natalie eilbert

The mist arrives, fogs the windshield, crashes the car.
All the long necks of geese measure the same height.

I want to meditate on one thing — the mist, the snow, the will
to change, but bad people call my friends groomers

for existing in their bodies, I who learned to people-please
from men who learned what to do about pretty girls 

from great literature. I listen all night to a bleeding highway.
Tires splash around the killed mist, indifference like wind

snagged in an engine. If I could grasp one thing, a pigeon
comes to me. The lilac chest, a pearl beat within, the red eyes

of a reformed demon. Once, I came across a hawk in the snow
kneading its talons into wet earth. It flew as I neared and out

popped a pigeon from beneath, dizzy with life, dizzy with death.
It walked once, twice, then was earth again, purple blooded snow.

If then if then if then, the heart of causation, ah, a devil moves

synesthetically in the brown wind. Somebody took my face

in their palm and I married them on sight, I who loves the if-then

heat of touch, oh I who loves the if-then heat of touch. I reached

a peak and the trumpet wailed, I swung with a stiff breeze and

a building collapsed. The cat scratched the side of a breeze, see

the world in a credit score change, if a lake then a breeze, if a chive

then a soup. The debt builds and a trumpet pirouettes. Somebody

touch me, the liverworts bloom. My whole life an anecdote, a 

simple note, a third rack in the oven leveled. And how we level,

a man, a shelf, a city. If breath, then rubble. If bird, then no. A flock

of heaven in the cranes, the grammar’s broken leg. If conflict, then

talk. If talk, the liverworts divide. Then skunk cabbage, then what

will we do with all the lies we tell ourselves.

The algorithm feeds me a disembodied hand pouring resin over a vase

and a sped-up video of how to make a backyard brick oven and how to make 

a volcano candle that seeps pink wax. I tell him as slowly as I can that I

have nowhere to go with my depression. But I watch another hand mash

red and beige clay on a pottery wheel and spin it into amphora. I stew

over a mistake. How do I make it to 40? Will I survive the dull convex

of my aging face. A woman offers a tutorial on contouring, looks ridiculous

painted over. I read comments, a pancreatic venom that’s found language.

Another video spins into focus, this dress is my secret weapon. Iran counterattacks,

the G7s meet on a Sunday, Gazans brace, Israel razes. I swallow a bloody clot

and hate that I must always be an I. A snippet of poetry like a sharp pain

at my cheek like a dream that begins while reading a snippet of poetry,

the words ribboned into a distant subplot, distant subpleasure, another

of love’s alien urgency. I try to hold it together, a candle that once spilled

gladly into mold. I try to welcome myself anew to the world. I’m sorry.

I believed the poem would shift if I wrote alongside my sleeping cats,
the sun pinkening them, the serene animal of no ego.

I believed seasonal depression made the poems punch more, a soft suicide
like grass growing through gravel streets.

I believed the poet saw feelingly, her sense diametric to the institution,
the poem a deranged tear in a firmament fogged by dirty endowments.

I believed we could come to the summit of meaning, guided by Gloucester, 
believed in the word crystalline only in the poem, that meaning, to exist, must leave us.

I believed I came up with the answer for poetry while stoned under a table,
the serene animal of no ego bearing always a god of vapor, then forgot.

I believed jealousy because it believed in me, a beautiful terrible feeding that is
the racket of poetry, the racket of enterprise, the speak speak speak of power.

I believed the Venn diagram of a cute shy girl and the cunty girl was a circle,
so I wrote a poem called Self-Portrait and deleted the poem called Self-Portrait.

I believed I could write a poem about exercise, the long muscles tensed
and working, the dazzling sky of our bodies, the equine breath of work.

I believed in the institution for many tax seasons, the money owed
and the money owed and the money owed and the money owed.

I believed the secret of the poem snakes through other people’s poems,
and meaning is a matter of finding its scent, kissing its wet earth.

I believed in no music, no encouragement, the days sealed shut. 

Do you see the pelicans gliding overhead, arching in a single direction? 

Now, poet, do you see?

There’s a story of a little girl who remembers her own death,

a car crash where everybody died. And I don’t know how it

happened but lately I tear up to hearing paranormal encounters.

Two men fishing in a sleepy Mississippi town, aliens with pincers

for hands. A boy who can fly down the steps with his kid sister,

a dead uncle lifting them each way. A djinn shadowing dreams.

Stuck in a haze of other people’s fear while my boyfriend sleeps

soundly. I show him the nail marks on my thigh, a recent night

terror, and he makes a 10-year budget plan. Climate deniers

flood my inbox, call me a shame to my profession. I draw a bath,

shadows moving around me like lace in a window. Beneath suds,

the algorithm responds beautifully to Miles Davis and I think of

my childhood, this angel-cast thing, and hear nothing but my heart.

Weed with Willie is halfway done; the townies sing.

And I’m in the best dive bar in the city, reading Fady

who says “It’s not easy as it used to be / to be alone

with the earth.” The exhaustion of speaking truth

to power when power aims to flatten our throats.

We quiet under Instagram feeds giving self-tanners, rare

beauties in balcony dresses made by unknown hands. 

I’m no longer attached to any of life’s trifectas. The multitudes

compound and kill our abstract memories: of digging

fingers into wet loam, of pulling the cap off an acorn,

discovering a wriggling maggot within. The lessons

that taught, numerous. Something impossibly alive can

thrive sealed away. That there is something inside me, or,

there is the wish of it. Little life, how you persist.

---

There is the wish of it, a little life: how we persist

alongside flashing bikini ads, phones face up, a seagull’s

squawk, the redheads in gis crossing the street. For nearly

two months, a boy has been missing, his face fading

on paper along the windows, his name scrawled in vigils

across many counties. Fady says there are more flowers not over graves

than over graves, and it’s a thought that turns rotten, like

a nail mark darkening a petal. I get smashed at the dive bar,

form a blood pack with the locals. Ghostbusters 2 plays and the plot,

pink psychoactive slime, doesn’t make sense without words. But sense

is a diktat, an oil derrick churning the earth into pebbles, my loneliness

into pebbles. Parking lots over land, so the child can’t dig, so the worm

dries into a snipped fingernail in its seal. Our secrets must lie to us.

Weed with Willie is halfway done. The townies are singing.

Life was easier when I didn’t eat. I could push myself to a fog

and nothing made sense. It explained my misery. Starvation

was my objective correlative, acid in my throat a means to say

the unsaid. How silly. Miles Davis plays and I take a bite, the bile

remains deep inside, a disarmed metaphor. Pain is the thing

that shifts with context, adapts and waits like a whistle around

a neck. I’m thinking of Cotard delusion again, a syndrome in which

someone believes they have already died and must be buried at once.

Was it Michelangelo who said the effect of death defends nature 

from all human passions? In the earliest account of Cotard, 

a woman senses a light wind on her side, grows paralyzed, 

and asks for a shroud. Another patient believed she lacked

intestines, stopped eating and did die. A psychologist tells me

the power antidepressants can have on chronic pain, a redirection

the way a bullet in the arm isn’t pain in an act of war. How easy

the body bends to belief. How funny it is to be cured.

The geese arrive expectantly and I want to cry until I’m dead. Black feet

on dirty snow, they brace against the gusts that down power lines. 

Elton John plays on my drive home from yoga, my boring wending,

a hell in which I am known like the face of a clock. I hate this year.

That I used to hum at readings, sip wine, buy merch books and talk.

A goose sits in wet earth, watching the parking lot cars, filled with

blood and wind. The expectancy, the cold she doesn’t see. Dear god,

I did not do violence to my body tonight. I breathed dynamically,

I thought of nothing but turning my body into a single tortured ligament.

I switch lanes and taste saliva, my sweet adrenal liquor. Yanyi writes

that the monument lives inside the body. Is that why I want to wrap rope

around my waist and pull my stone sideways, darken with new rain.

The relative buries me. My old hands along the Turnpike. 

I watch snow collect and drop in uneven squares many states

west. I don’t know how I got here. SSRI withdrawals just

for the hell of it. I like to watch my chest detach, shiver

over my life like a flimsy lid. The roiling weather. I read

a survival story of an avalanche. To survive, spit. I give you

my throat because I’m staging something. A cry to win over

all cries, grant me a gold-lacquered disc, a prefrontal fever.

Three payments are made to find my mother’s hips, the great

orbs that thronged me with a name, a terrible panic. I see red

bank statements, a kind of psychic flesh. What is it called when

love turns to fur on the tongue, is it sumptuous, does it taste.

I don’t know what I’m doing here. How did I get here.

The pelicans are back. I wanted you to see it,
their wings scrutable and gliding in a way so

foreign to me, like machines cheerily producing.
I can’t bear who I’ve become. I am like the gular,

an ugly word for throat. Did you know they have ridges
atop their bills, knobs that look like the names of girls

I knew, those Daryl’s and Susan’s who would also glide,
how home is everywhere for the prettily rich? DDT

briefly extinguished brown pelicans, who stoop powerfully
now on Louisiana’s lethal bridges. Trajectory has been

on my mind, the knowing atoms ahead, already there
to shape us into a chemical choice. The lines of their forms

at sunset, both awe and not-. Memory is the hand
touching without consent, which I cave to and present

as a gift, my sundering. My misery, too, can glide
indelicately, and when it lands, all it can do is land. Is this

why I fail at love poems, for all I’ve never seen. No.
Love waddles by a garden window like an injured possum,

its gait so familiar, the mammal’s anti-grace. That it knows
its headed to die in the hedge, that it knows where to go.