Light Thickens
Three Poems by Theodore Worozbyt
Wish
What is blue being when being itself is being blue, I wonder, I think. I read that padded question on the back of a cereal or cigarette box, when what wasp I wanted was the one that would sting best, not to mention reddest. My dog’s limbs spread apart on some carpet or blanket, and how can X swagger into my lung where the nineteenth hole fills up with a twelve pound nugget of yesterday’s eternal occasion? That map is black on a cocktail napkin, and I never called her, never would. I’m watching his knees say no. The cooler is still in its box, stainless but not quite in the room because it isn’t pity, not that shame isn’t worse. The man I hated at the top got fired quietly, so it’s as though he killed my dog with an axe made of h’s. It’s like a party almost becoming a party, a leash becoming a lease. It’s like wishing there weren’t heaven, so there’d be more dogs.
Next
Mondays they lift a star out of my mouth. Fridays the knife slips past gas refused, a cluster of deading needles, a dribble or two, some white packing and arms that swing trails of sussurizing OK?s, one hoverer asking a question that seems to me a matter of love, though I have impedimentary tonguelessnesses and cold silverings stick a question mark finger with metrical holes down my throat. My tongue hugs at stitched syllables. The music I prefer takes a long time to be tuned, not that I’ve asked for any love, and whited out girls pretend to run around, and the static tastes cold, and I am cash-heavy, the money is freezing a hole in my flat-assed pocket parakeet parabola hmmm umma gumma oh pink careful with that axe Eugene Oregon but when it comes as I lie on my back it is Poncé on a C3 Ramirez and so blood graft and carving whiz become remote and serene, and I could have told them, yes I could, but their language was absolute and technical and remote from the beautiful icily detached love I was seemingly feeling, that it was all the same to me what they did with their delicate nails so softly.
Light Thickens
Since then I spread a contingent of pureed clocks across the face plate into a comma with a soft stroke of my mothers o’ pearl spoon and then commenced to slice the rested meat, its exact color, as though radiation at a target meant amino acids. No one was looking; everyone saw. Saw the cloud where obstinate Uncle Ort gave up a tooth to gravity. Saw the samfire I hid under my thought of me. Saw the ray in the surf combing back and back as though I would. I could not have been less late to this, is what I was thinking, or so I chose to recall. The skin I’ve roasted flat and set it a sail across the flesh, fanned and hiding and exposing my spelling errors that kill. It’s almost not time to do that thing. Here comes the semi-albino pitbull under the surface, just as quick and quiet as wax. And then he’s over there, past the purple crunch of rope. Come. My hat fell over and it spills.
THEODORE WOROZBYT’S first book, The Dauber Wings (Dream Horse Press, 2006), won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize, and his second, Letters of Transit (UMass Press), won the 2007 Juniper Prize. Scar Letters, a chapbook, is available online at Beard of Bees Press.
Photo Credits: Hugo Simberg, Untitled, 1904. Courtesy the Finnish National Gallery.
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