Rachel Moritz
[Approaching storm; mackerel clouds]
Will you lay me down in flowing lines unmade as a wilderness? The crows amass like arrows at our back. They have broken their lease on the treeline and the window’s resin imprint of sense flies laterally toward them; they ascend. You see, you might have said, one thing I’ve got a good grip on is remove. The daughter of no one and everyone, don’t look at stars if you can gaze on me. Or, without the idea of wilderness, this country of life might have remained only an idea. Where birds along your spine are saying neither, neither, it’s the making of wild that unmade me. You have to come to the end of your concept of the human family, beyond the body’s fluids as morning wake, the ribbon of heat rising beyond these black, air-borne digits. What does it mean to wake by a window and go to sleep by a window? That’s the terror of love—staying, and staying in place.
[On the spiritual nature of air]
I made a little spot in my soul where she and I might live. In our fibres, the spiraling apex of the heart. Our cleaving, the gap between feeling and fact. Flames of the air-borne will where she’s audible. Or do you know how to stay with strong emotion? She comes to me in dreams, tastes of salt and wants nothing but to watch. If her chance doesn’t arrive for you, there’s only chance to accept. I’ve got this body who is real and failing. The soul is real, but what does she want?
Pineal
Then a cove blows taut & wintered with negatives who
is walking the lake ions,
internal as a pane of measured
glass betters the world by turning
in—world,
did you sleep well? Such reticence
I slept your odd nexus with my mouth
staved & swallowed
the drier shoreline or the last
leaf of year
as if the year were a window
and a window, snowing
the body awkward in the gland’s white
temple
Rachel Moritz’s poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, 26 and other journals. Her chapbook, The Winchester Monologues, won the 2005 New Michigan Press Competition. She lives in Minneapolis, where she edits WinteRed Press, a chaplet publisher of innovative poetry.