Sara Dailey
We Come Apart
From the universe’s beginning
we come apart,
the sweet heat of us
an explosion of gas
and matter,
an unhinging.
I want to say that you are like the sun--
by which I mean
I orbit you imperfectly,
by which I mean
I was a dying ember
until you lit me,
until you furnaced me,
until you flint-sparked
and coal-fired me--
by which I mean
I am burning
burning.
But we come apart.
The meteors of us
high in the atmosphere,
flashing across the night sky--
such lonely arcs.
Because Your Leaving is Like a River
I am mud-tongued—my words weigh
heavy like silt and I am sand bed,
a blue grey drowning,
silver finned Ophelia
surfaced, then
sinking.
The soul of me spreads like kelp,
a tangled and faint rippling
along the murk of water's skin.
Still I wind around you, am anchor,
fragment
carried
with you, into your heart's sun
blazed and suddenly dry land.
Winter Nights
Winter nights are the quietest.
Empty of the sound of cicada hum
and birds not out til morning.
I have missed the circle of you.
Empty of the sound of cicada hum,
the white snow still falling,
I have missed the circle of you
filling these empty arms.
The white snow still falling
over the tall birch limbs, snow
filling these empty arms,
like ice blossoms, pale as stars.
Over the tall birch limbs, snow.
I am empty, a half-gleam that exists
like ice blossoms, pale as stars,
in the garden in which you vanish.
I am empty. A half-gleam exists
and birds not out til morning.
In the garden in which you vanish,
winter nights are the quietest.
Praise Song
As the adepts teach: Praise where you are.
-Hugh Seidman, “Macy’s Elegy”
I sing to praise the earth--
the slight brown dirt
that dusts my skin
and clings to clothes,
the thin green stems
supporting flowers,
those petaled flags of spring
who droop white and wave
in the wind, full faced blooms
soaking in the ray’s last heat.
I sing to praise the women--
and to praise the men who fill
their hands with this dirt,
who feel the earth, each part
and particle of it, each moist grain
floating through spread fingers
to the opened and opening ground.
I sing to praise, to praise--
sun lit, we are glowing,
becoming, at last one
with universe, its trembling,
its unending cycle
of blossom and seed.
The Flood
Scant weeks before your death
still waters flood a town.
We watch them rise and rise.
It is the abandoned animals
that hurt you most.
More than the people
who had the choice to leave.
Animals depend on us
to understand mercy.
Have mercy, I pray.
Amid the ruined and drowned
wreckage, searchers
look for the lost.
I know where your body is,
but am still looking,
still lost. Have mercy
on me. Oh brother,
have mercy.
This September
I won’t visit your grave,
no more looking back, halved,
gaping at death’s illegible face.
Brother, I have given up on talking
to headstones in empty graveyards
where I believe no one is listening
not even the birds.
Instead I will think of how
our souls are like sea turtles,
their lovely and imperfect
shells collecting striae,
marks of rough handling,
close contact with coral
and the ridges of rocks
or how my belly turtled with his birth.
I gave him part of your name.
And so when I speak it now
to the baby, smiling at the Buddha
on the wall, it brings me only joy.
Woman: Jellyfish
I.
If I became a jellyfish instead of a woman, my body semi-transparent in the water like a globe of blown glass barely cooled, I would drape over my prey like a veil.
II.
Looking at me would be an exercise in flexibility. Seen through me, the squids and rocks and starfish, holding their bodies still against sand, would shade and alter, become endlessly mutable beings whose shapes were born anew each time Idanced.
III.
I would flutter and ripple, kick like a kite of silk slicking through water, graceful as an Olympic figure skater, beautiful as dew trembling at leaf’s edge. You’d welcome the death in my embrace.
IV.
Settling over you, beginning, your bones melting into the sweet sting of my kiss, we’d become one being, spinning circles of light. Twirling tornadoes of sand particles would rise from the ocean floor beneath us, because love has its own body, itsown shape, its own way of moving through the world, a series of endless ripples that widen beyond the circumference of arms.
It is no wonder then, when people die from a lack of it, like air, or from the sheer force of it rising up like blood in the lungs.
Sara Dailey's poems and essays have appeared in journals such as Ascent, Cimarron Review, The Bitter Oleander, Whiskey Island Magazine, and FragLit, among others. In 2009 she won the Shadow Poetry chapbook competition for her manuscript The Science of Want. Her full-length collection, Earlier Lives, which was a finalist for the 2012 Backwaters Prize, was published by Dos Madres Press in 2012. More information can be found at her website www.sadailey.com.
We Come Apart
From the universe’s beginning
we come apart,
the sweet heat of us
an explosion of gas
and matter,
an unhinging.
I want to say that you are like the sun--
by which I mean
I orbit you imperfectly,
by which I mean
I was a dying ember
until you lit me,
until you furnaced me,
until you flint-sparked
and coal-fired me--
by which I mean
I am burning
burning.
But we come apart.
The meteors of us
high in the atmosphere,
flashing across the night sky--
such lonely arcs.
Because Your Leaving is Like a River
I am mud-tongued—my words weigh
heavy like silt and I am sand bed,
a blue grey drowning,
silver finned Ophelia
surfaced, then
sinking.
The soul of me spreads like kelp,
a tangled and faint rippling
along the murk of water's skin.
Still I wind around you, am anchor,
fragment
carried
with you, into your heart's sun
blazed and suddenly dry land.
Winter Nights
Winter nights are the quietest.
Empty of the sound of cicada hum
and birds not out til morning.
I have missed the circle of you.
Empty of the sound of cicada hum,
the white snow still falling,
I have missed the circle of you
filling these empty arms.
The white snow still falling
over the tall birch limbs, snow
filling these empty arms,
like ice blossoms, pale as stars.
Over the tall birch limbs, snow.
I am empty, a half-gleam that exists
like ice blossoms, pale as stars,
in the garden in which you vanish.
I am empty. A half-gleam exists
and birds not out til morning.
In the garden in which you vanish,
winter nights are the quietest.
Praise Song
As the adepts teach: Praise where you are.
-Hugh Seidman, “Macy’s Elegy”
I sing to praise the earth--
the slight brown dirt
that dusts my skin
and clings to clothes,
the thin green stems
supporting flowers,
those petaled flags of spring
who droop white and wave
in the wind, full faced blooms
soaking in the ray’s last heat.
I sing to praise the women--
and to praise the men who fill
their hands with this dirt,
who feel the earth, each part
and particle of it, each moist grain
floating through spread fingers
to the opened and opening ground.
I sing to praise, to praise--
sun lit, we are glowing,
becoming, at last one
with universe, its trembling,
its unending cycle
of blossom and seed.
The Flood
Scant weeks before your death
still waters flood a town.
We watch them rise and rise.
It is the abandoned animals
that hurt you most.
More than the people
who had the choice to leave.
Animals depend on us
to understand mercy.
Have mercy, I pray.
Amid the ruined and drowned
wreckage, searchers
look for the lost.
I know where your body is,
but am still looking,
still lost. Have mercy
on me. Oh brother,
have mercy.
This September
I won’t visit your grave,
no more looking back, halved,
gaping at death’s illegible face.
Brother, I have given up on talking
to headstones in empty graveyards
where I believe no one is listening
not even the birds.
Instead I will think of how
our souls are like sea turtles,
their lovely and imperfect
shells collecting striae,
marks of rough handling,
close contact with coral
and the ridges of rocks
or how my belly turtled with his birth.
I gave him part of your name.
And so when I speak it now
to the baby, smiling at the Buddha
on the wall, it brings me only joy.
Woman: Jellyfish
I.
If I became a jellyfish instead of a woman, my body semi-transparent in the water like a globe of blown glass barely cooled, I would drape over my prey like a veil.
II.
Looking at me would be an exercise in flexibility. Seen through me, the squids and rocks and starfish, holding their bodies still against sand, would shade and alter, become endlessly mutable beings whose shapes were born anew each time Idanced.
III.
I would flutter and ripple, kick like a kite of silk slicking through water, graceful as an Olympic figure skater, beautiful as dew trembling at leaf’s edge. You’d welcome the death in my embrace.
IV.
Settling over you, beginning, your bones melting into the sweet sting of my kiss, we’d become one being, spinning circles of light. Twirling tornadoes of sand particles would rise from the ocean floor beneath us, because love has its own body, itsown shape, its own way of moving through the world, a series of endless ripples that widen beyond the circumference of arms.
It is no wonder then, when people die from a lack of it, like air, or from the sheer force of it rising up like blood in the lungs.
Sara Dailey's poems and essays have appeared in journals such as Ascent, Cimarron Review, The Bitter Oleander, Whiskey Island Magazine, and FragLit, among others. In 2009 she won the Shadow Poetry chapbook competition for her manuscript The Science of Want. Her full-length collection, Earlier Lives, which was a finalist for the 2012 Backwaters Prize, was published by Dos Madres Press in 2012. More information can be found at her website www.sadailey.com.