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Excerpt
Every day, a new web
is left for me, to dry by seven,
heaped up, hard to scan,
a gummy stocking. The radial swish
is shocking to my eye,
my touch; each time
I stumble, try
to hush the mesh.
Spiders don't keep anything,
vanish with their baggy juices
before I can remember what morning is.
I'd rather stop waking for weeks,
neglect so as to desire better,
discover,
although no spider has ever had to learn--
her craft in spinning was decided
before she was born. Designs transpire.
This one hangs in the door, fluttering
with loop-de-loop drool.
Looking, I think: city. Its streets are coarse.
I think, Armani. Faceted cling
and unusual stripes.
And I think, there's a vacancy
in this flat nest.
The spider did it and ran.
She forgot to put the postage stamp on. She was protuberant
in a thin hammock
that couldn't bear her vague spots.
Yet I like to picture her,
unwelcome artist scuttling on a strand
and vowing to create a disturbance.
She hurts the apparatus
as an iron can ruin ruffles.
A barbarism is inside us.
MURKY SWAN
Earth is testing us
to see how far we're filled.
The drenching is tedious. The swan
must be very cold.
She knits a white fiber
that doesn't belong to her,
kneading and working her insuperable shoulders
in dip and lull.
Her bill strokes like a cello bow,
niggling between feathers,
and she would never think of leaving
such a long sonata
of streaming isolation, lengthening
as sounds pat bay water beside her
and lift unseemly into mist-strewn air.
The large, vague, reticulate feet
are chaffing her runway loveliness;
her squat end, trying not to sink,
feathers a buoyant, beautiful triangle.
Her innerness lingers,
a diamonded, precise rhythm
of slick frond in that portal.
Secrecy softens such intimate parts,
and one suspects perfection
in the whorl unseen
of a knockout on a lake.
The bold and stormy body
will harbor it
until she sighs, floating off.
I want you
with a white clingingness and fury.
The swan must be very cold.
CARE
You want to be cared for?
The way the fox wraps its pitted,
lank tail around the cold char of its body?
Or as it happens to fishes,
stroked by sheer, sleek currents?
Is the sensing sudden, or a lush succumbing,
plum swoon, pearly listlessness?
Twined talons of a starfish attend me,
flung rock made desperate
in a long abominable drift, waiting,
and you might be a pelican
sagging with spent flight,
empty jowl reeking,
wings slack with grit.
Below you, twisted agate,
I entreat the dropped mussels,
provide you with a subtle footing
as tide slithers back.
My mouth has eaten sky
but I am starving,
always almost senseless;
I tire, dream of the starfish.
Each digit suckles with sleepless, grasping ends
that cling to substance as our cells
are said to seize themselves, but don't
with so much else to confront them:
blood fjords grazing forests of anemone,
wizard pods protecting the ravaged inner distance,
instincts roiling by, fluffy white.
The body blanches, tingles, squeezes;
you try to live in it
without me, planet's germ,
little innocent, fury.
I would comb the toss of river in the harm
you promise, ferry embolism,
lie in lightning underneath your eyes;
slip between pain and callus.
Care is like a rotting. Hear my heat:
it addles, loses, tightens.
BREEDING
They breed themselves, spendthrift, without help.
The tops have a tiff with the stalks
and start to let themselves out.
It happens once, a weak chord, a squeaked note,
and as the fern stoops to unfold,
the fiber groans in a song of sunstruck defiance
and want. Self-envelopment, self-desire, stun
with warmth, and the fern forgets
the life before light hit.
Comes a spasm of stealth abandoned,
underwater chucked, then that arch
with the wadded-up green circus in it,
coded, clenched. Consuming. Every fern does it,
maiden, heated, sired by itself-springs
up.
Copyright © 2000 Molly McQuade. All rights reserved.
