Lucie Brock-Broido Poems

Winter was the ravaging in the scarified
Ghost garden, a freak of letters crossing down a rare

Path bleak with poplars. Only the yew were a crewel
...

Don't do that when you are dead like this, I said,
Arguably still squabbling about the word inarguably.
I haunt Versailles, poring through the markets of the medieval.
Mostly meat to be sold there; mutton hangs
...

What was it I was hungry about. Hunger, it is one
Of the several contraptions I can turn on the off-button to at will.

Yes, yes, of course it is an "Art." Of course I will not be here
Long, not the way the percentages are going now.
...

Where is your father whose eye you were the apple of?

Where are your mother's parlor portieres, her slip-covered days, her petticoats?

In the orchard at the other end of  time, you were just a child in ballet slippers,

Your first poodle skirt, your tortoiseshell barrettes. As the peach tree grew more

Scarce each day, you kept running out to try to tape the leaves back on their boughs.

Once, I caught you catch a pond of sunlight in your lap and when you stood,

The sunlight spilt; it could never follow you. Once, above the river,

You told me you were born to be a turtle, swimming down. Under the bridge

Now you take your meals where the thinnest creatures live at the end

Of the world. Carpe Demon, you told me just before you put down the phone

And drank the antifreeze. This year, the winter sky in Missouri is a kind of cold

The color of a turtle's hood, a soup of dandelion, burdock root, and clay.
...

And to the curious I say, Don't be naïve.

The soul, like a trinket, is a she.

I lay down in the tweed of one man that first frost night.

I did not like the wool of  him.

You have one mitochondrial speck of evidence on your cleat.

They can take you down for that.

Did I forget to mention that when you're dead

You're dead a long time.

My uncle, dying, told me this when asked,

Why stay here for such suffering.

A chimney swift flits through the fumatorium.

I long for one last Blue democracy,

Which has broke my heart a while.

How many minutes have I left, the lover asked,

To still be beautiful?

I took his blond face in my hands and kissed him blondly

On his mouth.
...

On abandon, uncalled for but called forth.
The hydrangea
Of   her crushed each year a little more into the attar of   herself.
Pallid. Injured, wildly capable.
A throat to come home to, tupelo.
Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable.
Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear.
Wistful, woke most every afternoon
In the green rooms of the Abandonarium.
Beautiful cage, asylum in.
Reckless urges to climb celestial trellises that may or may not
Have been there.
So few wild raspberries, they were countable,
Triaged out by hand.
Ten-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Intimacy with others,
Sateen. Extreme hyacinth as evidence.
Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves
Will (perhaps tomorrow) die.
High editorial illusion of   "Control." Early childhood: measles,
Scarlet fevers;
Cleopatra for most masquerades, gold sandals, broken home.
Convinced Gould's late last recording of the Goldberg Variations
Was put down just for her. Unusual coalition of early deaths.
Early middle deaths as well. Believed, despite all evidence,
In afterlife, looked hopelessly for corroborating evidence of   such.
Wisteria, extreme.
There was always the murmur, you remember, about going home.
...

Mouthful of earth, hair half a century silvering, who buried him.
With what. Make a fist for heart. That is the size of it.
Also directives from our  DNA.
The nature of  his wound was the clock-cicada winding down.
He wound down.
July, vapid, humid: sails of sailboats swelled, yellow boxes
Of   cigars from Cuba plumped. Ring fingers fattened for a spell.
Barges of coal bloomed in heat.
It was when the catfish were the only fish left living
In the Monongahela River.
Though there were (they swore) no angels left, one was stillbound in
The very drawer of salt and ache and rendering, its wings wrapped-in
By the slink from the strap
Of his second-wife's pearl-satin slip, shimmering and still
As one herring left face-up in its brine and tin.
The nature of  his wound was muscadine and terminal; he was easy
To take down as a porgy off the cold Atlantic coast.
In the old city of   Brod, most of the few Jews left
Living may have been still at supper while he died.
That same July, his daughters' scales came off in every brittle
Tinsel color, washing
To the next slow-yellowed river and the next, toward west,
Ohio-bound.
This is the extent of that. I still have plenty heart.
...

Silk spool of the recluse as she confects her eventual mythomania.

If it is written down, you can't rescind it.

Spoon and pottage bowl. You are starving. Come closer now.

What if I were gone and the wind still reeks of hyacinth, what then.

Who will I be: a gaudy arrangement of nuclei, an apple-size gray circle

On the tunic of a Jew, preventing more bad biological accidents

From breeding-in. I have not bred-

In. Each child still has one lantern inside lit. May the Mother not

Blow her children out. She says her hair is thinning, thin.

The flowerbed is black, sumptuous in emptiness.

Blue-footed mushrooms line the walkway to my door. I would as soon

Die as serve them in a salad to the man I love. We lie down

In the shape of a gondola. Venice is gorgeous cold. 3 December,

Unspeakable anxiety about locked-in syndrome, about a fourth world.

I cannot presume to say. The violin spider, she

Has six good eyes, arranged in threes.

The rims of wounds have wounds as well.

Sphinx, small print, you are inscrutable.

On the roads, blue thistles, barely

Visible by night, and, by these, you may yet find your way home.
...

What makes you think I'm an eccentric, he said, in London
To the rag of the reporters who had gathered to report

On his eccentricities — the tin sink light enough for traveling, but
Deep enough to swallow his exquisite hands in water filled with ice.

A budgerigar accompanies, perched atop the fugue of Hindemith.

You are trembling now like the librarian reading
To herself out loud in her Arctic room

Composed entirely of snow.

A broadcast (high fidelity) bound by the quiet of the land and
The Mennonite who told him

We are in this world, but are not of this world,

You see. From the notebook of  your partial list of symptoms, phobias:

Fever, paranoia, polio (subclinical), ankle-foot phenomenon,
The possibility of  bluish spots. Everything one does is fear

Not being of this world or in this world enough.

There is no world I know, without some word of   it.
...

No feeding on wisteria. No pitch-burner traipsing
In the nettled woods. No milk in metal cylinders, no
Buttering. No making small contusions on the page
But saying nothing no one has not said before.
No milkweed blown across your pony-coat, no burrs.
No scent of juniper on your Jacobean mouth. No crush
Of ink or injury, no lacerating wish.
Extinguish me from this.
I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost
And flickering in unison with all the other fireflies in Appalachia,
Blinking in the swarm of it, and all at once, above
And on a bare branch in a shepherd's sky. No Dove.
There is no thou to speak of.
...