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Self-Portrait with Goffstown Deep Black and Sun-Up Intensity Black at its blackest. A town asleep. The only way to walk deeper into the black where the weatherboard homesteads seem to rise. I edge, like the blind, down the rainy incline which is a tunnel channeling one thought to the end of it: leave her in this town. Leave her among the quiet woods and the saturated grass; leave her where some say she belongs, give her back her life, her family and her shiver of trees now shedding their way to cicatrix in the season she most adores, now black, black-leaved, black-boled. Such dark can funnel you the decision when its walls are close so turn, right now, turn right now, turn right now – to see above the town such a vast ingot-ring hemorrhage out from the mountains and take away your choice. It dents, it stabs, your pupils with its intensity. It says love is the havoc at which you cannot balk. Take her out of this place which holds her, stunts her, neglects her, a million miles from the world; the sun’s further off, over the gulf throbs in furious truth: it says, know her, you have found her. Take her from this place. Against the depths of black, it says, this the insistent brilliance: it burns behind your sternum and it burns behind hers. 140 Arcimboldo’s Bulldog
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Self-Portrait with Mary Ann Lamb’s Akansas Toothpick Mother, you lie at the source of the long black river that does not love the world. You knit black shawls at the very end of it. Your needles are ivory’s shocked white. Mother, you made yourself a necklace of unthinkable things which jangle and clash, which knock and witter together. You bid the Nibelung dwarves come to your knees and they bob all around you, waiting for you to choose. Mother, you clamp that caliper around the heads of those who will travel up the river. This is how you assess them. You scrooch over your own body like a bird, you pick up a crumb from your lap. You watch your reflection in the vague oval and dream it is someone more innocent. Mother, you laugh, rock back, you have no teeth in your head which is full of perished veins only, you claim, and little else. You sit in this room, in the deepest of chairs, wrapped in your shawls and chair-arms like a sunken fog, like a ghost with a wide mouth. Mother, when younger, you turned your head away against a cirrus-blowing sky. from The World Before Snow (2015) 141

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Self-Portrait with Goffstown Deep Black and Sun-Up Intensity

Black at its blackest. A town asleep. The only way to walk deeper into the black where the weatherboard homesteads seem to rise.

I edge, like the blind, down the rainy incline which is a tunnel channeling one thought to the end of it: leave her in this town.

Leave her among the quiet woods and the saturated grass; leave her where some say she belongs, give her back her life, her family and her shiver of trees now shedding their way to cicatrix in the season she most adores, now black, black-leaved, black-boled.

Such dark can funnel you the decision when its walls are close so turn, right now, turn right now, turn right now – to see above the town such a vast ingot-ring hemorrhage out from the mountains and take away your choice. It dents, it stabs, your pupils with its intensity. It says love is the havoc at which you cannot balk. Take her out of this place which holds her, stunts her, neglects her, a million miles from the world;

the sun’s further off, over the gulf throbs in furious truth: it says, know her, you have found her. Take her from this place.

Against the depths of black, it says, this the insistent brilliance: it burns behind your sternum and it burns behind hers.

140

Arcimboldo’s Bulldog

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