Lisa Russ Spaar : 22 Poems

 

Midas Passional

 
No one has touched me for weeks
yet in this drugged, gilt afternoon, late,
 
when nothing is safe, I’m paralyzed,
as though so wildly desired—passing solo through the garden’s
 
cinnamon, marigolds, famished roses, where a matted shingle
of the swept-up human hair I begged from a local beauty shop
 
& spread out fruitlessly among the blooms & canes
to keep away the deer might well be a satyr
 
passed out in the palace’s candied gold—
that something regnant with a strange, godlike power
 
could not help but reach out from the umbral blue
to tap my white arm. It is a day to die,
 
the light autoerotic, theatrical, with an unbearable listing,
stalled in cusp, in leonine torpor. Is courage artifice?
 
As though to answer were within my means.
Or to even move my mouth.
 
 

 
After John Donne's "To his Mistress Going to Bed"
 

 

What might she send — a wet sleeve,
or platter of brine-latticed bluefish
 
dusky with capers, lemons, wine;
a briar for your thumb, a mouth,
 
lunatic,  to suck the blood:
a signal that one too often
 
inside & now beside herself with thoughts
of you wonders how she might woo
 
and through dew-whetted keyhole
pursue & sing & win? She is marvelous
 
with waiting. Come. Hunt here.
Relieve with hands and tongue her heavy hour.
 
 

Temple You
 
 

What is mysterious about loss,
flush of arm pulled from a wilted sleeve,
 
summer’s urine-tang in autumn leaves?
Let   John Keats light another fag.
 
Or Brontë refuse the doctor
on her black sateen settee.
 
For whatever part of   you
may be taken away, you said,
 
is the scar I will visit first
with my mouth, each time,
 
as gold visits the thieved till,
sun the obliterated sill,
 
saying praise you for leaving
me this you, this living still.
 

Temple On My Knees
 
 
When this day returns to me
I will value your heart,
long hurt in long division,
over mine. Mouth above mine too —
say you love me, truth never more
meant, say you are angry.
Words, words we net with our mouths.
Soul is an old thirst but not as first
as the body's perhaps,
though on bad nights its melancholy
eats us out, to a person.
True, time is undigressing.
Yet true is all we can be:
rhyming you, rhyming me.

Temple Tomb
 

      John 20: 11–18
 

In this marrow season,
trunks tarnished, paused,
 
I am garden. Am before.
Asleep. Then the changes:
 
placental, myrrhed. Wet hem
when you appeared.
 
What did your body ever have
to do with me? In my astonished mouth,
 
enskulled jawbone guessed,
though as yet I didn’t know you.
 
You sprung. You now intransitive,
tense with heaven.
 
Gardener, which of us said do not touch.
Which one of us was undressed?
 

 

Duet
 

      New Year’s Eve
 

Two sisters side by side,
benched at the gleaming fin
 
of the living room’s out-of-tune baby grand,
work out a mash-up, Adele’s “Hello”
 
& Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights,”
Hello, it’s me. . . , Heathcliff, it’s me, it’s Cathy,
 
voices by turns treble, then cemetery-dusked,
meandering, & hungry
 
as the sinew-tracks of moles
sponging December’s yard,
 
painted mouths of iced puddles,
branchless leaves snaring the window
 
with inhuman gale.
One swallows this heavy beauty,
 
rolls the mordent perfume
back to bloom as the other slips out
 
of autumn’s whalebone stave, descant.
They sing as if still girls. As if before
 
love’s scarlet evidence, & not, like the year,
the trees, already moved, moved through.

 

New Year's Eve
 

I'm a sucker for a gothic ending:
for example, this opal brooch of sky,
like milk tinged with blood
 
behind a leaden fret of branches,
the year going down, distant as nursery glow,
natal and passionate.
 
Returning to my car in the dusk,
along an alley of tall boxwoods
hiding private yards, with houses
 
at the far ends of them, each extinguished
by a certain compromise and sadness,
my tongue stung with champagne
 
from a party I've just fled,
coat heavy on my shoulders,
reminder that all ways are one, at the last—
 
my throat stops suddenly with longing.
Not for what I still don't know,
but for what I have known, with you inside me:
 
blue on blue, and that fierce, white star.
Dark arteries. Splendor of hope's risk,
still running there.

St. Bed Of Snow
 

 
Would rather be lying there? No.
Though my pillow is a backwards-wound watch.
 
Cream linen of another country
where I lay in troth with you, hands pressed
 
to the wall, those pages . . .
Tonight, opium protocols of a full moon
 
blanch alluvial oak leaves.
Rather lie sheeted in frost there & pray
 
for the forgiveness of you,
absent friend? Yes. Yes. Words
 
failed me. O to swallow them
back. Rackety wind muslins the beeches,
 
illusion of a calendar in storm.
Autumn to winter. Turn again. Don't end.

The Wishbone: A Romance
 
 

Never to belong again to wings
     that lifted, to heart,
to blood’s forsaking bodice:
 
this lyric forceps,
     felled flèche d’amour,
furcular picked and dried
 
with earthy feints of sage
     & fused with remnant gristle—
clavicles tongued, now thumbed,
 
memento mori
     of a hard year. Why not,
then, after giving thanks,
 
break it, too—
     talismanically? What good
is loss starved forever after?
 
To keep from freezing,
     even a priest might commit
the Virgin’s statue to the flames.

Celibacy 1
 
 

Unmarried, the heart ejaculates
what it must, scarlet-purled, arterial,
 
away, away. Or conversely, married,
it requires all—venous, freighted with wastes.
 
Here the analogy breaks down.
On the radio, I learn the Brits
 
are into all things Scandinavian.
Sun-lit schools, bare breasts, the aurora borealis.
 
A “scandy trance.” Maybe. Ice is a mystery
of whatever blue enchantment swiped
 
my view this morning. This is no allegory.
I’m north of myself these days
 
with a fist full of silver keys
I lose every night in my dreams.

Celibacy 2
 
 
Nervous, twigs split, become swallows,
jeté the platinum poring chits
 
over horizon’s bistered tinge.
Is a murderer secreted in us all,
 
a person we once knew,
even embraced in a photograph
 
without premonition? No way
this season knows it is ending.
 
Instead of “murderer,” let’s say “orphan.”
You’re leaving, you say? Either way,
 
what to do from now to then,
when language means to stay?

Love Poem
 
 

I want to give you
more than these words
finite as husks
or a string of barbed wire.
I want you to see
the blue knot my fist made,
cast down against this page
in sunlight so bright ,
it seemed to swallow
the marks I made here.
How the chuckling shadows
of full-leafed trees
swarmed around me while I wrote,
as though winter
were some remote, impossible joke;
and how they lengthened, eventually,
like the day,
into roads straight as rods,
slabs of gold, consoling sun
on either side
denying that there ever really are
any other paths
than the one we finally take.
I want to give you
what you cannot see here,
the shadow of my body
spilling across your face
when you lie under me,
as deep and intangible
as honeysuckle or any living thing
that heaps its fragrant weight
against a fence,
trusting it, forever.
 

 

 
A Doubt
 

It  is nothing, a mordent
of the spirit,
a small fall
like the exhalation
of a breath
the way that;
for just a  moment
after  the rib cage sinks
in a house:
where someone is dying,
there is a silence
so deep, it is impossible
to tell its source,
or to believe
the veracious beating, whispering
like a small, sharp scruple
in your own  breast.

 

The Whales
 
 

Belied, be-laired, in sleep’s massacred vista
of blood that is the sea within,
 
like a god, entranced from above,
I felt the whales before I saw them, gorgeous
 
foetal continents, lost, glistering, parental,
mare-blue beneath sediments of stellar silks,
 
planktal glass, moving the wrong way
up a narrowing, inland stream.
 
With all my blindness, I wept
to save them, mysticeti, their kimono lobes
 
pharyngeal bells, and lonely spume,
their homesick crying like a scarf of fox grapes
 
reaching sailors still hundreds of miles
from land. They placental. They
 
in four-chambered beyonding.
And my own heart, beached – erupting
 
into hollow room, to closet door,
to clock face, where I failed
 
and failed again to help them
over the rhapsodic rasures of this world.

 

Orexic Hour
 

My body, made to be entered
& exited. Almost wrote “edited.”
 
Eaten. Odd to be so direct.
Who cares that the maples blistered
 
with renewal today, at last,
despite shackles of snow,
 
not for me, not for you,
obeying an instinct akin to human,
 
but not. Still freighted
by the gadget of a self, I admit
 
I care. Is it my appetite for this violent
flux – crocus mons afloat beneath oaks,
 
stamen, odor, bulb-aroused mouth –
that, against effacement, I invent?

 

Departures : Chapter One
 

Morning's mirage, disdainful & calm
as a mirror,
 
held the shorn bush that yesterday
flourished,
 
now lopped canes & a scant spitfall
of remnance,
 
confetti trampled in the clefts
of vanishing deer.
 
To touch its truth I punched my fist
into the chopped molest,
 
the boscage—withdrew my red sleeve.
Abstract that.

Anniversary
 
 

Like a balcony, seized from behind,
held up by gods no one trusts,
 
deity of pseudonym, of crush, ransom notes,
ropes, lies. Sometimes abandoned
 
but not unpromised among the terraces
of air. I waited there.
 
Years. And love at last did climb, O Romance,
the thorny orchard balustrades
 
even as I press now a silvering arm to railing,
Never mind the centuries.
 
Ours is an old tale. That first time,
flush from climbing, as I fawn-stared
 
from a chalice hold of hall-light, in chain glint
he unclipped from belt, watch, coin, keys,
 
taking time in an aerie of sheet and mirror,
flitch of mooned curtain panels swelling,
 
holding, blowing away the world,
that from our faces disbelief might fall.

Edisons Insomnia
 

As the early-evening Metroliner slows
and sidles at dream-flight height
through the apocalyptic back lots
and whistle stops of New Brunswick
and Metuchen and Menlo Park, I think
of the insomnia of Thomas Edison,
awake at 2 AM, his cot shoved
against a rack of galvanic batteries
in the gas-lit den of his laboratory.
Some of the men are still at work
on his latest rush of ideas—boiling up
insulating compounds, experimenting
with vacuums—while Edison scribbles
in a notebook another deft, driven ink drawing:
florid, fecund and amoebic improvisations
on his notions for the spiral burner, and the invention
that will become his “big bonanza,”
the electric light. But this is boy culture—
 
it’s not all progress—and a litter of cheap cigar stubs
and sandwich crusts clutters the tabletop
of burners and spectroscopes. It’s paddle
your own canoe, and late-night pranks—
bets on who can produce the highest voltage
on a hand-cranked generator, guzzling beer
into their black bear mascot, or rigging
an induction coil to the washstand to shock
the German glassblower. And as the train
lurches past the strung-up streetlamps
of outer Elizabeth, each one-legged
in its own pool of spotlit asphalt,
I consider the insomnia of the first Mrs. Edison,
Mary Stillwell—whose name Mr. E once
dismissively doodled into “stillsick”—alone
for years of nights under her moon-drained
counterpane, a revolver under her pillow,
before she died of “congestion of the brain.”
On the verge of night like this, gliding
toward the city through the radiant, industrial
hamlets of chemical plants, past blacked-out
yards of abandoned, blown-windowed, turn-of-the-century
factories, and then, beyond
sumac, glimpses of sub-shops and gas stations
and neon-edged corner bars—passing through
this way, it is possible to believe in coal
and drills and clocks, in the America of grist-mills,
smokestacks, and gears, of escapements
and steam engines—of foundries and forges
and shops—and in our fathers, in droves
from the tract houses, who rode these rails out
each dawn, to the labs and offices
of Westinghouse and General Electric,
Con Edison and Merck,
and then rode them back again each night
to families moored in fragile, incandescent rooms.
There’s the skyline now, ablaze and looking—
 
for all its steepled, invisible rave of technospur
and cyberwave—like the complex, constellar
circuitry of the inside of something.
I learned in school that the nation
extinguished itself for one dark, full, silent
minute that October that he died. And here’s
the glare-shattered river, the bridge, the strum
and hurtle of light through girders, then the earth,
blasted open to admit and halt us.

 

 

The Insomnia Of Hildegard Of Bingen
 
 

Return to me, cleft
of living light, scissure
in darkness, fierce,
scotomic rain of haloed sparks
and extinguished stars,
whose pain is my familiar,
my purpose, my assurance of salvation.
Gone from me is she
who, in my ordeal, put the damp pearls
of her fingertips to my temples,
and saw in these ecstatic
visions less an obliteration
of my self, and more a kind
of kunst, a matter of my art,
and of preparedness for the pure,
searing reality of suffering
and of love that is divine.
My eyes open now onto hell's
dull and unrelenting shadow—
but also I see her as in the dawn,
glowing and adorned with virtues,
and as she appeared, once, in my chamber,
when she could not speak, and I calmed
with the lace of spanned hands
her throat's small and flustered vessel
until she was not silent.
Am I not God's mouthpiece?
Or am I nothing more than tithed daughter,
last rites read at my beginning?
Melisma of bodiless light,
I beg you: besiege my flesh,
free my heart—lift my sorrow
and my remembrance—
make room of me once more.

 

Occult Autumnal
 
 

From what bleat of the marching band’s castrato section
concussing the distant stadium, tonight’s horizon,
 
did it rise & pelt, bat-like, loopily blind yet radar-rending
my heart, old fruit that still so valiantly suspends—
 
like the Hanging Man at a garish Tarot reading—
in the ribs’ wet hamper, now packed with leaves?
 
Not the tea kind, all smudge of portent & bergamot.
No. Evening riffles the deck, lays out against sky’s grotto
 
the Queen of Flavored Vodkas. Also known at evening
as Lorraine of the Industrial Sunset. That’s my Jersey talking.
 
With what haste, then, did the Prince of Volcanic Foliage
run off! As though offended. But already I feel him aging,
 
two towns off, burning down another bridge.
Loneliness is a sourceless sorcery, a mapless acreage.

 

Riesling
 
 
Ancestral slosh, black forest
of bridge trestles, syrupy rivers of South Jersey,
O Lutheran, O German School, O being Shunned
 
& Different there. But also here, where centuries
of Rhine, of Alsace, still in me find me,
stone-benched & exiled, innoble, petrol, history,
 
with wastrel dragonfly vagrant at my glass—
sugar, herb, perfume. Everything but the squeal
in the pepper pot, Germantown scrapple,
 
souse, head cheese, but for generations this scleral draft,
prow and ease, melancholia's sweet quench
washing it down. All distance. Day's blench.
 

How I Might Sound if I Left Myself Alone
 

Turning to watch you leave,
I see we must always walk toward
 
other loves, river of   heaven
between two office buildings.
 
Orphaned cloud, fish soup poppling,
book spined in the open palm. Unstoppable light.
 
I think it is all right.
Or do tonight, garden toad
 
a speaking stone,
young sound in an old heart.
 
Annul the self? I float it,
a day lily in my wine. Oblivion?
 
I love our lives,
keeping me from it.

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Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, including Glass Town (Red Hen Press, 1999), Blue Venus (Persea, 2004), Satin Cash (Persea, 2008), Vanitas, Rough (Persea, 2012), and Orexia (Persea, 2017). She is the editor of Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson, Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems, and All that Mighty Heart: London Poems. A collection of her essays, The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry, was published by Drunken Boat Media in 2013. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, an All University Teaching Award, an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and the 2013-2014 Faculty Award of the Jefferson Scholars Foundation. Her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series, Poetry, Boston Review, Blackbird, IMAGE, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Slate, Shenandoah, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other journals and quarterlies, and her commentaries and columns about poetry appear regularly in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She was short-listed for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Reviewing, and has taught at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Seattle Pacific University, and the Vermont Studio Center. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

Poetry Foundation 

“Revived Again, Again, Again”: On Lisa Russ Spaar’s “Madrigalia: New and Selected Poems” By Peggy Ellsberg. Los Angeles Review of Books, February 17, 2022. 

Lisa Russ Spaar, poet and essayist, reads from her work on April 27, 2017 as part of the Barbara and David Zalaznick Reading Series at Cornell University.
 
Cornell University

Lisa Russ Spaar website