CASS EDDINGTON

& w/ this vernal hurt

we make do with the white when the red is gone

the residue makes
a little pink
it took two of us
to do this
while talking and laughing
not even touching

a rose is a rose is rose a rosé

petal     pigment
we dismiss     essence
ingest instead     the pleasure
I once took
in selecting     neither
the most costly     nor generic

cosmetic, to insist     I am
growing properly

look at my aesthetic reference:

leaves pressed in a book & later found

marking no passage of significance

inchoate even while what’s green in us breaks down

why leave behind husk or chrysalis

hanging by a bit of fiber

I wanted to know        

                                         decay

                                                       and development

                                         without

                                                       mark or

                                          measure

                                                       made visible

*

what’s ours by chance or demand
we make visible by claiming

my lunch
my bicycle my bus
my toothbrush
my coat my
time my rhyme
my life my line
my sister my friend
my kith my skin
my inflammation
my resignation
my hunger my home
-guilt my insatiable
congregation of parts
my anxious wanting
in my sheets how solitary
I work up a sweat
my dispensable nation
for a bus route my flagging
oration my admiration for
my dedication to
my friend
my friend

how we would attempt
to claim a whole city even
that it might result in a tether
yard of promise & neglect

circumference of your own bark growing hoarse

but whose mouth doesn’t want to make the shape
of the names that echo our feet against the streets?

I had done it once before
made a list of foreign streets
where a former-we had once lived
precipitously over the course of one year

                 Warschauer Straße   

                                                        Wichertstraße 

                                      Grünberger Straße  

Großgörschenstraße

I read them out loud to a room
of men I had the luxury of dismissing
& their girlfriends in whom I saw    myself
reflected, refracted    iterations, sharper edges
than any of us could have then known

voicing each voiceless
palatal fricative, I made
the sounds like they couldn’t

               I place the pronoun on a rocky shore
               an ever-inaccessible vanishing point

               the ocean lapping the shore as much as carving a cave

               remembering again, your voice

               has come as far as

your body

can go further

not how far can I throw myself
but how might I strike the air

the church bells’ sounding incessant
on all the holy days they wake you

when there is no light

in the courtyard, the nightingale sings
trying to drown out the city with its song

though I was shedding some parts
I still wanted to hear my name

chime with hers & hers & hers & hers

our voiceless velar stop
ours a reduced vowel
ours a diminutive gloss

the choice to make the shape to say

I like it & also I like the story I am telling

*

& elsewhere will you walk with me
in the middle of the nameless
numberless streets
I once called home?
were they wide enough—
for horse and buggy?
for a covered wagon?
for the imperialist
to finally unfold
his vision?

how we shrink or expand to fit the landscapes we’re given
mouths full of lineage     saltwater, blood

like the dead pelican we found on the Salt Lake’s shore
its perfect sun-bleached ribcage full of trash

water rushing, bubbling visibly beneath
the surface of the ice, of the not-yet creek

*

we call a thing “mine” so we might imagine
a future we might live in

others always so certain of
a future “you” might live in

to project themselves ringing with blue bells

to find themselves
                                  in spring

I wear a softer shade to herald what I love 

*

I fear less than I should
but this serves me
more scared than anyone knows
of love, and wet for the world
again, everyone beautiful
in their own shape and season:

to return to the place
where we were
opening

prodding
the earth to grow
to move to know
where we began
in treetrunk ring
-ing of rootrot
song, so necessary
the felling
in crabgrass-

hold, spread
of morning
glory, weeds
withsuchnames
to prompt you
to love them
a crop of vetch
for fodder or cover
we imagine, catkin
willow-soft, and
mallow, milkweed
growing in the verge
of other fruiting bodies
with varicolored rings
growth visible if you
get closer, of herbs
of flowers, vegetal
mineral, clitoral, of hoods
of sepals and stamen,
spathe and spadix,
pistil, any style
to encircle, any analogue
to prove we were here

at times how I try
to fill my lungs with my lovers’
lingering scent in my bed
& other days I strip it clean
until it smells just like me

& w/ this vernal hurt
& w/ with the incidental body
& w/ the mouth as major mover
& w/ daylight’s reckoning across horizontal stripes of a semi-chosen aesthetic
& w/ memory of prepubescent bodiesstraddling lake driftwood
nothing but a bit of lycra between pubis and steed 

* 

I’m pretty human. Some record of that would be nice, I told her
when I was feeling sad w/ melodramatic invocation of Keats,
writing my name in water, etc. 

*

it felt good to be walking in the direction others were coming from

searching for another currency than we’re afforded

*

eager for sleep to overcome I put my book down before I am done

what’s next and next and tomorrow and the next

I.

That we fall into waking precipitously, the cliff of the mind suddenly revealing itself where once a meadow seemed to lie, bright garment of promise. ‘L’appel du Vide,’ E. told me. The distance between feeling and knowing, a skittering, we work too hard to cross. Bogs flooded until berries float. We marvel again at someone else’s labor. As though there was less mucking, less mud to name the work dirt. Irrigation, irrigation, an incantation. What it looks like from above, how I know it from below. As it is above, so the clit aches below. To ask with what, when we are each familiar with the tug from within. The insides might be turned out. And then, of course, happy as we were with the pomegranate split open, the rarity of the fresh fig, all their seeds on display, we were also hungrier, pleased with the task of picking a carcass clean. My animal heart and tongue.

How long had we waited for the ditch, caked and dry all winter, now slick with sudden life, edge of danger.

II.

In the morning when the mantle has not yet lifted from us, our mind is most like a limb. Are we closer to light or closer to death?

In the evening we hold a mirror, wonder where we have gone since morning’s light last touched.

The women who played opposite each other in the tv show made me feel I was headed toward one of many possible homes I had never known. Carried half-feigning sleep, from the car to the bed. Gentle carriage. It’s confusing how it’s always blooming there. And elsewhere we have known that acrid cave, have heard a dripping echo. The desire to hear an expression, specular reflection. An utterance overwhelmed by its voiceless asking. Our fear more insistent than the magnificence of seacoasts, the tacit knowledge of a well-worn car seat. The lilacs dramatize themselves in clusters. The alley sings. I coax it out of myself alone.

III.

I kept having bad dreams where I either rescued or hurt her. A gunman, a lover. Alternating night sweats with cold longing. But we are only as special as that adage is empty, indulgence given to children when adults know the limitations can be suspended just a little while longer, choose your favorite candy bar, hurry up! you’re not buying a car! What hurt most was being unable to imagine anything beyond our empty palms, our open mouths. Yet every loss, our own (un)doing, even while our bodies were hemmed in. Geography of sudden mountains. Lake of refuse. Thin and arid history of boys and their revelations. The horizon an ever-receding mirage. It pierced but could not enter me. Lately a distance rising within where I might rest from time to time. A rift. Any instance of the body coming to resemble itself, utterly unrefined. Shame, ultimately uninteresting. What we hold against our chests in our long striding, the landscape becoming hushed against our movement, our lineage looser, our grip tighter. When the subject ceases. She wanted to know, when does it.

Cass Eddington is a poet and translator from Utah. Their chapbook VERNAL HURT is forthcoming with Magnificent Field (Spring 2020). Her manuscript if the garden was a finalist in Kelsey Street Press's Firsts! competition. Recent poems can be found in La Vague. Cass writes, teaches, and loves in/from Denver.