Where Can I Put It Down?
Thought repeats. Says, oops, already wrote that. And dawn like fingers cracking. Aubade like song. Home comes dreamt and I, economy of self, split to be a piece of night. Piece of time and fruit. The fig, damp as April’s light. And I, economy of self, split to windows. For one last ray before daybreak. It is unsaid, saying. I and longscraped knees, traffic of remembering. And beating wings of days. Carried, surprised. This feeling. Where can I put it down?
In Defense of Artifact
~~~
Who am I, sometimes?
Artificial and in many
places. Immediately
memory has mind,
carries shadow
genderless in blueblack
wordless in conversation
with each animal.
Bats and pups
mourn above the sky,
mud drinks the days hour,
to which I’m not invited.
And what of apricots?
Immutable pits,
summer’s spoons,
dark like the horse’s
throat,
and limitless,
the million eggs
carried on the donkey’s
back.
~~~
Even relic I trip
on, and to who do I ask
my questions? Endless
season in the soup bowl,
my my hands lean to warmth,
a small steam,
a piece of land,
an ever emptied church.
~~~
No memory is wrong
but inarticulate most times,
like the sea that raises
the swallow’s angles,
exacting gestures of reach.
(Here the swallow mimics
grief (or the wild syllable
of yellowing dreams (stung
by the tongue of the wind.
And the wind’s instinct
to follow the sea—
or is it the other way—
convinces my hands
to meet my eyes,
there and always
a conduit and I,
addicted to salt,
reclaim addiction
and am maddened
by physicality, pleasure.
~~~
These two eyes
an archaeology
of spent time,
of ruined water.
The mare’s head,
her stained teeth,
mastic in the clear bowl.
(Each jaw,
ancient (masks
an opening.
~~~
Notebooks, content, opened
documents, wooden trunk
of chests, tempted artery
gazing and,
annotation, anthropology,
anchored in anachronism.
Knots justify the mastery
of trees, death and longing,
textile, undone, bottomless,
which is to say, endless,
finally,
~~~
I am trembling in this year’s
indifference. The fevered
sun comments without end,
and I am sure to throw
up my arms in accent.
So silence, fire
and fire, and thousands
of skins attempt
impossible ideas ,
a new leaf glistens
with new water.
~~~
Time is a perfect
argument for these hundred
curiosities (these genealogies
of loose thread.
The cat on the table
is Greek,
is now at my feet,
and grandmother
ages backwards.
~~~
All negative is ours
and green and sick
like the birds, tall
like grasses shining
in November and dying.
So where is the throat
to crawl into? Tongueless
and in awe of uninfinite hour,
unaesthetic art and evening,
headed for unvertical morning
where moths gather
in causation
following light for home.
~~~
This fragile house,
eroded by salted wind,
those walks we took
on the roadside
where now, a dog,
displaced by the thick
plumage of night, weeps
at a hanging orange,
confusing it for the moon.
~~~
-
Natalie Stamatopoulos is a Greek/American poet concerned with language as relic, artifact, as micro-connection to our infinite timelines. Her work has been published in No, Dear Magazine, Slanted House, Ctrl + V, The Paris/Atlantic, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn.