Amy Glynn: California Poets Part 11, Four Poems

Amy Glynn

October 20th

California Poets: Part XI

Amy Glynn

Four Poems

Prima Materia

For you, love, nothing but the blind-faith leap

from the glacier-sculpted granite to whatever

is next. Like, what’s the worst that could go down?

Another uninnocent elegant fall into

the unmagnificent lives of adults. It’s true,

you have to do it running… But it’s toward,

not from. And the distinction really does

mean everything. If we have nothing left,

what can they take away from us? Not this

triumph of negative capability:

exult, you human cathode, you are safe

in knowing nothing’s safe and never was.

Whatever’s in your heart of hearts, your sleeve

of sleeves is patterned with a morning glory

motif. It speaks of resurrection, so

it’s also speaking of collapsing ash

and everything between. You firebrand,

you moebius band, you lemniscate, you freak,

you phoenix: all the incandescent things,

peach-flesh and psychoactive flowers, dry

flares from the gums and ginkgoes, the white torch

of limelight, foxfire kindling in decayed

timber—all these belong to you, and you

to them. You carry only what you need;

and what you need will carry you away

in time. Don’t worry, Love. It all makes sense.

You do everything that they ask you to ‘cause you don’t

mind seeing yourself in a picture as long as you look

faraway. You see things they cannot, and what

you can’t see doesn’t matter. When it does,

you’ll know. For you, dear peregrine, only

the wide sky and the cliff, the distant skirl

of nestling sparrowhawks. You wouldn’t want

an angel watching over you; surprise,

surprise…. But they will do it anyway

Spell

They say

what wires together fires

together; that what you think about you bring

about, that thoughts

become things, that we manifest

what we expect because

all is resonation and like

attracts like except

when like attracts unlike, because unlike

literal magnets, in the human

magnet that is desire

yoked to will,

the polarities align to make real

whatever we spell

out, dwell on, well up with from

the mineral-rich, diatomaceous

western waters churned up from the deep

ocean by the Coriolus effect—all of this

to say that in the end

we must speak

carefully, and consistently, and say

let it be destroyed

and say It came to pass as it was written

and I create like the Word

of God as it murmured over

the primordial seas, saying

let there be light: we speak

ourselves into existence and we pay

the man behind the curtain

no attention lest

it break the magic, which to the one

who wields it is no magic

at all, but sheer

determination to set

the terms of engagement

with a mantra and a talisman and hope—

no: know—the elements

will bend according to your will.

Kildeer

It naturally always started with birds. You’d seen 

God in the chapparal, burnished epaulets

glinting, one yellow claw in a dainty hover

clutching a squirrel’s head, and you had to call me,

all rapt for a raptor and wrapped up in azure and buff;

the lonely man with the walking stick cresting the bluff

in thrall to a vision invariably destined to spiral

into a riff about things riding thermals and rising and rising,

ferrous oxide fading into blue and somehow turning

into wayward sex, and probably, if we’re honest, it would all

have been clever as hell because we spurred that in each other

and that was the wonder of it. There were days

when yours were the only kind words I might hear and that, dear

freakazoid, I have never forgotten—and by the way,

if you think that makes it easier to say

the other stuff? You weren’t just a predator; you were

a moron. A moron who memorized Hopkins and Keats

and knew the names of a hell of a lot of birds. Don’t lay

your bullshit at these feet, K. I have the words,

not to mention the selfies—though they are not of your face.

You come at me holding your goddamn sanctimony

out like the wing of a killdeer in some pathetic

evasive ploy. Leave me out of your stories. As if

I’d made them up? Had you had an ounce of respect

for either of us you’d have zipped it, mon ami, and I mean

that in as many ways as you can mean it. Sure,

we’re all susceptible to the slow blur

of selective memory, the aperture

widening-narrowing like the amber pinpoint eye

of a falcon. Thinking I deleted what you wrote

because you told me to? That’s something else

entirely. The truth is that I seldom speak of you

at all—and never, not for nothing, to your spouse—

but when I do, it’s usually not about 

the tipsy dick-pics, the refrain about

bending me over your desk someday, or your bids

for reassurance that I’d be “discreet.” I kept that all

between us—but I kept it all. The other day

a killdeer hopped into my path, in full I’m-wounded

cosplay. Funny: that’s exactly why I saw the eggs.

Delta

A specular reflection of the low

sun on the delta: sodium-roadway-light-

orange on water still as tempered glass

until it’s sliced to ribbons by the slow

work of the poler, whose mokoro might

have been of his own carving. Sparks of brass

erupt across the channel with each stroke,

and fade to amber, rosegold, apricot.

Made for the shallow channels of a vast

seasonal wetland, the canoe cannot

entirely engage with or get past

the tiny dramas in its path: the streak

of liquid fire set off by the bill

of an ibis hunting reed frogs, the slow red

rain of kigelia flowers and its chain

seduction of the sugar-hungry. Still

the sun clings to the edge of a flood-fed

theorem that states that something will remain

amid an infinite subtraction, slow 

as the lotuses and every bit as keen

on surface tension, and on placidly

obscuring certain features of the scene.

What they’re protecting’s on a need-to-know

basis, and far too deep for us to see.

Author Bio:

Amy Glynn is an award-winning poet and essayist whose work appears widely in journals and anthologies. Her first poetry collection, A Modern Herbal, was published by Measure Press; her second, Romance Language, won the Able Muse Book Award. Among other honors she has received the Literal Latte Essay Award, the Troubadour Prize, The SPUR Award of the Academy of Western Writers, Poetry Nortwest's Carolyn Kizer Award, and three Best American Poetry inclusions. She lives in Sonoma, California.