from The Not Knot
Celia Bland
The fiber of language presses my ribs.
Life is not a walk across a field.
Life is a plowed furrow of cerebellum,
a porous condensation: that is, an idea.
“I am all fibre,” Virginia Woolf writes in The Waves.
She is interlocutor, all present tense
exhaling temporal sensuality — and yet,
it is as if she were dying and
the heightened experience of that
symphony of the mundane,
I am,
I heard, I saw —
must become, finally,
I alone.
I am alone
fashioned from clay —
even my mind — wet clay
drying.
Ghost of My Mother Not Yet Expired
Her figure was encased
in a dull
light smoothed into the puff
ball they call
a devil’s snuffbox. Step on it and
spores flurry. Tiny bellows. Tiny lung.
Her ghost was this pale mushroom that smelled.
It twinkling like a puff of
herself
exfoliating kind of frequency
like grief
that clears air
of warmth. Just as in
life, people moving aside,
chilling.
Like a ghost not yet expired
no one can look at her features
and recognize her.
No one makes jokes: puffball
snuffbox mushroom
bellow of ash.
Will any silence fit?
Russian Criminal Tattoos and Playing Cards
Bored in the Hamburger Bahnhof
I browse the bookstore for postcards.
I don’t want Koons or Beuys.
I long for an art that scoops from darkness
the thick air of Venice, the low
Netherlandish fields, arid clarities
of Spain. Suffering as a pictorial
talisman — a plumage
of rotting potatoes, the hollow
throat beneath a father’s
knife — that beautiful
sigh in stilled action.
I pause before a book
artfully miasmic of
dominance
and submission. Flipping
through its catalogue of scratched
skin and paper mug-
shots, stencils patterned
for blood
hearts and diamonds
rules for games
I know like I know my
own veins.
On the tram back to Pankow,
I can shelter this scarred
evidence
of labor camps, millions lifeless
or be-numbed, I can feel I hold
a secret I must shield
from fellow
commuters
like it was porn. Blood,
blade, slice of bread, pilfered
match heads and spit
ground to charcoal ink
for pricking.
My own skin emblazoned with a barred
window: I am a slave of fate.
The cashier is pleased when I produce
from my pocket exact change.
Celia Bland’s third collection, Cherokee Road Kill, with pen and ink drawings by Kyoko Miyabe, received the 2015 Raynes Prize. She teaches poetry at Bard College and is Associate Director at The Bard College Institute for Writing & Thinking.