Elizabeth Breese
Dear Sir or Madman–
It was an inside joke, pressed
into a single word: purée. It resurfaced
not even periodically, until the juicy details
were vapor and the word looked funny
but meant applesauce.
Some language needs to be spoken for
and this is a powdered wig.
This is rain falling to fall again.
Was that a smile? Or was it a mouse
in the shadows? In France, shadows
have double-helix stairwells:
thorn of the paranoid consort, a marble
likeness of ourselves—we who
taste traces of intricacy and cinnamon.
Prayer
Among the thinnest things
is the shadow of a bell;
there all the hours stretch into one
violet note and all the angels are roll-called
Violet for the tips of their wings,
snail-dyed and air drying
in flight towards us: we, thinking
quietly, we’re only as good
as our tummies. And doubled-over
with loss, too, for the one who eased
bristle by lavender bristle the mousy skein
and released it to the birds.
A double kindness shown.
A kind of credo from the windows blown.
On the next wisp of air, blackberries
offer themselves to the mortar and pestle,
sieve, and salt fixative, to the silks
we might kneel in,
if kneeling was the only way.
In the Old Deaf School Topiary Garden
where we fed koi crackers
of themselves, where cannibalism
tickled us, I wondered
what was being made in the shade
of Seurat’s leafy parasol:
a year of undoing
all the common senses, so that
I didn’t feel the thrown glass
slice my feet, only discovered
dried blood in the form of a dog
sniffing the riverbank.