Three poems by BETH BACHMANN
(sugar)
Destroy it so the body can breathe. I asked
for water and you let go the wheel. There’s never
enough power to flood the field or drive the blood into
its cage. It’s impossible to read the ruins without the missing
part – Bring the bones to be burned. The flesh has too many holes.
Ruined, we say, of the fruit when it is all juice, of the body,
of the bed sheets, of the word we cannot say alone.
25 The Paris-American
Destroy it so the body can breathe. I asked
for water and you let go the wheel. There’s never
enough power to flood the field or drive the blood into
its cage. It’s impossible to read the ruins without the missing
part – Bring the bones to be burned. The flesh has too many holes.
Ruined, we say, of the fruit when it is all juice, of the body,
of the bed sheets, of the word we cannot say alone.
25 The Paris-American
(salt)
The snow needs more
to oil
its throat into song. The birds
are gone
and the deer are greedy,
eager to cauterize.
Slip me
a hinge. My hands are tied
like blackened flies. My fingers: hackle and feather.
Rock, rock, quiet water, rock. What rhymes
with rose
-flushed glass? The sun’s a blood-bath.
26 The Paris-American
The snow needs more
to oil
its throat into song. The birds
are gone
and the deer are greedy,
eager to cauterize.
Slip me
a hinge. My hands are tied
like blackened flies. My fingers: hackle and feather.
Rock, rock, quiet water, rock. What rhymes
with rose
-flushed glass? The sun’s a blood-bath.
26 The Paris-American
(landscape: hyperventilation)
You or I or the air says deeper: breathe; the brain needs blood. Mountain-sick, the moon
comes nearer, giving in. More blood? Isn’t it full? Where to put the mountain in relation to
the shadow, the human, the hunt, the hole in the fence? Almanac says, if there is no death
in five days, there will be water. What for, if not to smother or wash out a mouth
before it enters silent? Moon, moon, keep moving your fingers and they become a wheel
beneath the tiny legs of the stonefly. Moon opening, moon closing, nymph skin crawling over
the riverbed, you like to say it first. In the mountains, it’s easy to get caught watching
something you shouldn’t. It doesn’t hurt the snow.
27 The Paris-American
You or I or the air says deeper: breathe; the brain needs blood. Mountain-sick, the moon
comes nearer, giving in. More blood? Isn’t it full? Where to put the mountain in relation to
the shadow, the human, the hunt, the hole in the fence? Almanac says, if there is no death
in five days, there will be water. What for, if not to smother or wash out a mouth
before it enters silent? Moon, moon, keep moving your fingers and they become a wheel
beneath the tiny legs of the stonefly. Moon opening, moon closing, nymph skin crawling over
the riverbed, you like to say it first. In the mountains, it’s easy to get caught watching
something you shouldn’t. It doesn’t hurt the snow.
27 The Paris-American
Beth Bachmann is the author of Temper (Pitt Poetry Series, 2009), winner of the AWP Donald Hall Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her new manuscript won the 2011 Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award for a book in progress. Find her at www.bethbachmann.com
