the singing knives

After Maya Stein

You are a June bug and a legally blind genius and a single calla lily. You are a wooden bench dedicated to a surfer taken by a wave, and you are a coral snake. You are also a bowl of salty peanuts and white lace curtains and fizz in the nose from ginger ale on ice. You are a Carolina reaper chili and a glass of milk. You are the bubble man and the cookie lady. You are a Slabside Cobra and a rice paddy. You are the one who opens the door to the process server. You are a waterfall and the well the little girl fell into. You are the melon rose and the bag of chicken wing bones leaking grease. World, we need to talk. I’m trying to understand relativity and singularity. I’ve given up wondering what magma is doing inside the volcano. World, your rate of speed confounds me. I’m looking back at you from Earendel. I’m adding dignity and mashed fennel to stew. I finally threw out the broken printer and crushed some oak leaves. Let’s do this. Let’s fly moth-like toward the light. Let’s dance like Elaine. Let’s love the lady slipper orchid and the black-billed hummingbird, but not too much. You know how we can be, dear world. 

                      after Jean Valentine

Another way of saying young, or sapling, or hapless: green, as a blade of grass among countless other grasses, bookbag slung over a nonchalant shoulder, or a shoulder full of trying to be nonchalant, there on the corner of Brattle Street and Eliot, steel-toed boots laced tight, poems blooming in my heart like mute swans, like acorns. I tried to force life into them, but they wouldn’t speak, leaned away from me with their long necks, their hard shells, with their meat hidden from me and any listener, but still my feeling that they should be poems, the way learning to bicycle is something you can try but not make happen until at the last moment you don’t fall, a swoop in your stomach the arc of a dark bird rising above rooftops, black against the sky, its wingspan a kind of bridge between effort and what happens at the edge of knowledge. The stumble that wasn’t, nested inside of the flight that was. That was 1987, Harvard Square the hub of cool, buskers with their open cases, a bustling world within a world that I would visit and try to belong to, with what sophomoric friends I traveled there with on the train. It was summertime, our hours our own, our grasp on each “I” of us inexact and blurred, to ourselves and to each other. How could I pin it to the page, when to be alive and growing was such an exercise in being lost? That wobble, on the curb’s edge, that posture of daring, or not caring, or not knowing much of anything at all. Had I found myself able to look into a mirror and see my self, I would have met what is my soul, the tail end of a good dream, dissipating at the brightness in a morning window. Impossible to hold—light on the surface of a lake. A huddle by the newspaper stand on the corner, clutching our record store and thrift shop finds, we just stood there, not yet us but trying to be, and watched.