Lighting the Shadow - Brossura

Griffiths, Rachel Eliza

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1935536575 ISBN 13: 9781935536574

Casa editrice: Four Way Books, 2015

Riassunto

Lighting the Shadow is about a woman’s evolving journey through desire, grief, trauma, and the peculiar historical American psyche of desire and violence. These poems explore the international and psychological wars women survive—wars inflicted through various mediums that employ art, race, and literature. Furthermore, the collection is about a woman’s transformation and acceptance of her complicated attempts to balance her spirit’s own spectrum. Pulling the poet away from death, these poems insist that she open her life to her own powers and the powers of a greater world—a world that is both bright and dark.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of three collections of poetry including Mule & Pear (New Issues Poetry & Prose), which was selected for the 2012 Inaugural Poetry Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn.

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Lighting the Shadow

By Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Four Way Books

Copyright © 2015 Rachel Eliza Griffiths
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-935536-57-4

Contents

The Dead Will Lead You, 3, 
Diaphanous Corpse, 
Woman to Lightning, 7, 
Small Prayer to the God of Epiphany, 10, 
The Woman and The Branch, 11, 
Woman, With Her Own Crossfire, 12, 
My Dress Hangs There, 14, 
Disarming of Shadow, Arming of Light, 16, 
The Reckoning of Relics, 18, 
Elegy, 20, 
Fragments of Poems Returned by Sender, 22, 
Native Fire, 24, 
July 13, 1954, 25, 
Home, A Photograph, 27, 
Another Woman's Coat, 29, 
July 22, 2012, 32, 
Vergüenza, 37, 
Self, Traction, 39, 
A Dark Race for Enlightenment, 
Recurrence, 43, 
26, 45, 
Woman, New Delhi, 46, 
I Select My Jury Before Justice Appears, 47, 
Occupy Flower, 48, 
Elegy, 49, 
Anti Elegy, 52, 
Before Blood After Honey, 54, 
Elegy, Interior Figures, 55, 
Human Ceremony with Watermelon Sugar, 57, 
The Year in Pictures, 58, 
"a word of rescue from the great eyes", 64, 
Verses from The Dead Americans' Songbook, 
new world, 79, 
questionnaire: foreclosure, 83, 
ambition, 84, 
gun minor, or the inconsolable constellation, 85, 
new culture: creature, 89, 
dear America, 90, 
gymnopédie, 92, 
33 ages for solitude, 94, 
a dry run: American Caesura, 96, 
The Human Zoo, 
Recuerdo: Primal Art, 101, 
The Human Zoo, 102, 
About Progeny, 103, 
Uses for Silver, 105, 
Self, With Praise, 107, 
The Human Zoo, 108, 
The Skin I Live In, 109, 
Elegy, 110, 
The Human Zoo, 112, 
Somewhere, 113, 
Dusk, Monochrome, 114, 
The Human Zoo, 115, 
Self Portrait, With Decay, 116, 
The Human Zoo, 118, 
Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

    The Dead Will Lead You

    Across scarred meadows, red
    blue, white. The star-flung sky scrapes
    gold grass. Unknown milk, endless
    the stone figures in the fields.
    Who will embalm our bones?
    Shattered inside of mythologies,
    we are idols, praised by blood & sun.
    You will call & listen for the children,
    cradled in moonlight. Side-by-side,
    their silence deranged,
    deflowered by ghost primers.
    Years pulse the skull,
    the ashen hills, the expanse of desert
    shorn with prayers. You walk alone
    through mirages, museums,
    eyelids, water, estuaries
    where wings repeat flight
    until this desire is memorized. This,
    is what you must learn
    by heart. The closed flesh
    as commandment, a terra cotta
    smear of fingerprints
    praying along the blue cave.
    Mercy is the pulse of lupin
    in a yellow field. My mother's
    eyes are forgotten vases of irises.
    Lighting the shadow, a woman
    crawls out beneath her own war.
    Ruin, I have lived
    inside your estate.
    I remember the night horses
    reckless with beauty
    when the trembling poured
    through my windows,
    the animals surrounded my bed
    as we floated through
    the house, the world without sail,
    anchor, ornament, or oar. My memory
    was a painted mast, filled
    with the inviolate breath
    of what history can
    blow apart.

Diaphanous Corpse

"I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth."

— Sylvia Plath

    Woman to Lightning

    after Ai

    We rolled in flashes of God, fighting
    pleasure as it tore
    our shadows across smoke.

    When we burned of life nothing was better
    than our purgatory of embers.

    I wanted a matchbox. A grandmother clock. I wanted the dark
    house shingled in blue & bruised

    wildfire. Touch me or, err.

    How could I ever forget the shame on my floor,
    a birthmark of you. I covered every mirror. I grieved
    the squalls of our silhouettes, rising & dying. Once slave,
      I pulled my passage over the earthly gush of swells.

    Revision that I was. Passing through the aviary of dead poets,
    their naked bird ribs glittering with time. The universe
    pressed like a coin upon their opened eyes.

    Saltwater poured over joyless shoulders
    as I was carried out of my life. Through blood
    I sang & erased my name
    until I could only name your arrows.

      I've got the scars to prove it.

    The nights were static & strained. I left the radio low
    & returned to its amnesia each morning. America,
    shining like a gun. I practiced. The barrel of my voice

    aimed at thunderheads & headless saints. The volume of my life
    so uneasy beneath evenings of starlight & dread.

    Loneliness dragged me by my hair through back rooms
    where emptied velvet chairs watched me struggle
    with this blow of light.

      You were happy, weren't you?

    I tried to grasp the fingers slipping through
    (the smear of)
    my dreams. My footing struck clouds. I swear

    I meant no harm.

      But you were happy, weren't you?
    Like the backhand of a palm flying
    to my face.

    The desire in the flying,
    the wing, blurred.


    Small Prayer to the God of Epiphany

    You heard me ask not to be harmed.
      As if you could
       or could
      not be harm itself —
      undressing that old speech
    & so you were the waters, pulling
    dead weight up. Broken words could float
      if breath was complicit.

    You'd want me to unhinge, finger
    by finger, the place where I held
    to rock.

      Leaping from the cliff
    wasn't as interesting as holding the weight of flesh
    in winter air. We try to establish
      what infinity is, what eternity means —
    it means there is a distinct forever
    that can be calculated
    never to arrive.

      I lifted my hands in the night.


    The Woman and The Branch

    I knew. I knew. My mother gave me
    her bluebird of happiness. Carrying the glass
    inside my skin to school, I was young.
    Show us what you have, the world said.
    I was polishing somebody's rapture.
    It wasn't mine. Not my paradise
    or my mother's love, but oh god
    how it shone. I could never tell
    which bird was singing. I went home
    like a canticle to its branch. I flew
    through gray leaves away from
    childhood. I gave my mother answers I knew,
    didn't ask whether there was another color —
    was blue right after all? Was happiness
    a song to be shattered?
    I couldn't explain the frailty, how
    the figurine had cracked
    when I looked through its life.


    Woman, With Her Own Crossfire

    The earth within the mind
    yields a paradise stoned with hills where
    red-tailed gods circle
    women who balance thirsting
    basins of love like crowns.

    Kneeling in daylight in the middle of the road,
    my dress & eyes torn
    back to bone, I could not leave you stranded.
    I held your body against my face. My heart,
    alone with the shape of your dying. The former shadow
    no longer speaks & the tongue leaves
    no elegy of sludge.

    How to tend a corpse of love? Which wound is
    the most fatal? Shame dislodging
    the seahorse of a spine?

    Yet I was dragging you, dead-eyed & silent,
    over the stones, until I could not
    distinguish whose blood left
    a new road
    the mimosa trees would not mourn.

    In a harbor of white crosses, you were erased.
    This potter's page hovers it shroud of clay
    over the seal of you

    my mouth
    watermarked.

    Let me know my scandal:

    you & I,
    today & the past,
    time & bone,
    were once simple inventions.

    Let me join lightning as it welds the body
    to another bridge
    of infinite volume.

    Let me tell you
    it will be soon. The glory
    of my household
    filthy with stars.

My Dress Hangs There

A woman pulls night over her hips & makes the bleak seams blur the faith of her legs. If she names blood she will exist. The woman called Memory will have enough to wear in a room glazed with silk & flames. I hang my flesh on the French door as her light shakes my hunger into sequins. I'm small & scratch her heels. History stalks my body, examines my teeth, my scalp, & thighs. What can I bear for the narrative? The auction? The fondled hips of an alphabet switch partners inside a score I won't follow. My dance card filled before my birth. Will I scale my story? In the middle of a city I am between years of ruin. My eyes walk the street below while my shadow dangles between the Hotel of Impossible and the Hotel of Mocking Words. There is my tongue near the curb where a woman's shadow is feeding a songbird. There are the curling night scrolls of my hair. The feathers I once wore at my ears pause midair as if listening. A tomcat swaggers past a storefront holding a piece of my cheek in its mouth. It's early & the workmen whistle, coaxing sunlight from their pitches of tar. The men look up at the world & hold the sky by its own throat. They beg the dawn to leap over night's skull. Dream me a woman, they say to Memory. Above, the other woman who is History never kneels in the sightless canals of pleasure. She will never eat bribes or pay twice for her mistakes or affairs. The hearts she buries are anonymous & she gathers them against their will. This woman can have any life she wants. Any defeat. Do you want my life, I say. My voice is a gold streetlamp corroded by ghost moths. The victory is always the same. Across the room I watch the moonlight flicker in her unlit breasts. Beg me to take your life away. Beg for me like a man, she says. The height of desire as it falls to day.

(Mexico City, 2010)

    Disarming of Shadow, Arming of Light

    I wish I were like Johnny Cash
    & thought my heart was mine.

    I've worn a black suit
    my entire life. It suits the war
    my eyes ignite.

    My sins sit on my lap,
    bald, blind, desperate
    for the mercy of lost roads,
    glottal white lines.

    Only smoke will take me
    far to nowhere —

    a woman living
    between
    her own burning road

    & a charmed God —
    the unmarked sky
    where a plague of blackbirds

    fell across my back
    like an unlit cross.


    The Reckoning of Relics

    This is the gristle of imagery. The need to see what is past. Not
    history, not the Before or Long Ago, but the saint's finger, the
    sarcophagus of imagery, the immortal phrases of headstones.
    Somewhere after death, a detail remains.
    Sits in the mind, brightly impenetrable as a mineral:
    lapis lazuli or diamond. It was June in Austerlitz
    & I was circling the stalls of my life,
    flinging kerosene over what I'd done wrong.
    The stars slid over hummingbirds in the evening.
    Deer neared me, then turned away
    in the meadow's lumina. Beneath apple trees
    I sat & rubbed my hands across the bark
    of my own skin & the red compass within my ribcage.
    One afternoon Peter walked me through Millay's house,
    asked me to imagine the house, the woman's work, the masks.
    I was staying in the barn, invisible from her windows,
    taking a month to heal the broken flames
    of my phoenix, the better woman prepared for flight.
    I walked for hours, miles, became a vapor,
    returned from ash, wrote to Tracy, climbed trees,
    met black snakes & barred owls, breathed
    like a firefly. Alone, a frame of light
    in a museum, without a painting inside,
    without a self-portrait.
    In the morning high grass floated
    beneath dew & I listened to
    my new flesh: the truer poem.
    The listening saved me.
    Even when my ears bled & my heart leaked.
    I stood at the window in my head
    & looked out at the loping black bear,
    the pinions of black crows, the thickets
    of youth flattening beneath my whispers.
    Upstairs Peter held his palm out to me,
    the hush & eternity of a dead woman's curls,
    faded with threads of red.

    (Steepletop, 2012)


    Elegy

    "Cut my shadow from me.
    Free me from the torment
    of seeing myself without fruit."

    Federico Garcia Lorca

    The night has let go of me & touches the barren grave where
    my shovel works. The poems are stony beds, inscribed
    imperfectly. They are also loaves & lovers. Dear
    enfants,
    the cradle starves & I wander
    across the god-flecked bridge between night valleys.
    The meadows in the old country are sawdust.
    The moon douses my hair & peels my breasts. The sun
    forgets me, leaves no gold treasure
    on my hips. Memory is a burnt child
    I carry on my back. All of the hours refuse to stay longer
    when the last glass of Bordeaux
    runs out of the house, clutching its belt.
    My secrets have chapped lips. Once I gave them honey,
    blood, & language. I never inquired of their subtle pain.
    Why should I want their torment? Why do I believe in fools?
    Now I see gardens wherever roots were pulled up.
    A smile of quiet wheat thrives in the ash of mud. A seed
    shaped like youth blown backwards. I close the gate
    & switch on every light
    my flesh has needed. Even the tongue
    in my mouth, diluted
    by farewell, shines with the love
    of letting go.


    Fragments of Poems Returned by Sender

    You were waving when I looked back.
    When I scraped winter from my flesh
    & mimicked the silence of geese,
    bruised arrows skimming grief.

    Somewhere I moved beneath trees.
    I'd love to name their limbs for you
    but can't you see past all that? Anatomy
    says we're all the same.
    Symmetry, flawed by soul, errata,
    elegy & so forth.

    I was crawling across lawns,
    feral & flattened
    into lies & scored lines,
    dive bars & overtures.
    In the dark I swung my legs
    across the wooden prows
    of men & women lost at sea,

    the misery
    of a jukebox, paid & repetitive.
    Appreciated for nostalgia

    alone. Closer now is the absence
    of snow. Because it is summer
    & the heat unfastens like a black dress
    around my legs. My dark cries
    claw the dance floor.

    Give me a call,
    let me know how you're doing,
    I write to my friends
    from the hospital
    in a common gown of birds.

    Somewhere resembles you
    but it is not a location. There is no point
    where the map picks up
    the sum of oceans. The grid's ablutions
    raised over blue madness,

    the symmetry of absence
    in a mirror with no one
    looking.

Native Fire

A woman burns in the socket of midnight. She opens the door of a house she once abandoned. Where the men had taken her, walking her into the kitchen while they made her light their torches. A woman in her own passage, she looks up at the sky from her own belly where she turns & melts like evening. The dark is warm, she tells the ash that falls from the sky all year round. Next to her body the pulse of a secondhand memory fades until the red turns brown. She taps the window of the earth's dreams. She makes a door with her breath and falls through a blue field of ocean. Sister of Icarus, step-daughter of Oshun. The ghost ships in the river do not speak as she beats her wing, her belly of ashes heavy as clouds. Life is taking something away, she thinks, holding Leda in her arms as the swan's shadow leaves them alone again. The distant music of her house crackles. But this is right, this homelessness she has made with paint, flight, & bitter honey. Her body floats in its oil of silence. Life gives us everything so that there is really no choice. Slowly, over her shoulders, dawn is the anonymous mouth that rips her spine apart.

    July 13, 1954

    "I live on air, accepting
    things as they come."

    Frida Kahlo

    Because you sat upright, not yet
    ash. Already myth, yes,
    already. Spine broken into bone silence.
    You sat upright near fire,
    preparing as the phoenix must
    gather her fires to die. Lady Lazarus
    whispering inside your silence.
    Fitting the body into lightning, the
    faces, painted & photographed,
    a furnace of dreams wait in paradise.
    Because we gathered around your ribs,
    your hundreds of convex embraces
    & dignities. Near the immortal needle
    of desire you'll twist perpetually,
    out of reach in paint, pleasure.
    Blazing, your night hair & soft
    bones descend through the canopy
    to kiss your coverlet of skin.
    I never write an elegy for you, Frida.
    But once in late spring I lingered
    in a sky of laments
    at the top of the stairs in your house.
    The last room. On the last day
    a young man with eyes like burning
    told me She is still here, he
    said, pointing out the urn, shaped &
    brown like a humble creature of the
    earth, glazed by the hands of a tarnish
    that glazes anything worthwhile. Animal, which?
    Pre-Columbian, two clay arms extended
    to hold your fatted death & afterlife life.
    I don't always tell where
    she is, he said in Spanish, his voice
    splitting like a fruit. Frida,
    there is a death mask of your face
    on the canopied bed. Above, God
    waits like a mirror. In the corner
    the painted leg in its red boot
    waiting to dance.
    I am talking to you,
    naming comets
    & my deaths in your name.


    Home, A Photograph

    I can light a match in the window
    where a woman stands
    within a cadaver of silence.
    The wind of nothing
    pushes through bone
    frames & flypaper studded
    with dying. The stillborn brick.
    Childhood is a torn animal
    left out of doors. Buried
    beneath the porch
    with treasures & baby teeth.
    The tomatoes that never grew.
    My face hides in the mud
    cellar near broken lights.
    The skin of walls, widowed.
    Where canopies folded
    into fists & prayers.
    Inside the eaves
    of the body, a bird
    slams its song
    against flight.
    Where the laughter
    spilled & burnt like sugar
    in a hearth
    of visions no one
    could set free.


    Another Woman's Coat

    for J.H.

    Alone with snowfall & pockets
    of silence beneath shining streetlamps,
    I pull her coat closer, finding spaces
    in its arms. These seams do not belong
    to me. And I won't know this yet —
    slipping along snowy Remsen. I stop
    on the Brooklyn Promenade. I'm solitary
    again & stare at the city lining the river.
    Against air, I pull the hood down,
    burrow inside her wordless
    flesh. Alive from dancing
    with friends & the music
    of that pulled over me
    like an eyelid of glitter.
    Can Manhattan's insect
    windows make me out
    on the other side of its veins?
    Gatsby's green heart
    of a wish. Or whatever
    was above me
    that looked at my mouth
    in the dark & said
    Yes, that's enough, isn't it?
    Blinking, immeasurable
    in snow that needles
    like fire, I'll walk,
    a Siamese with ten shadows,
    amongst dense brownstones.
    Heart, what joy inscribes your telescope?
    Snow light growing the shadows
    of sycamores & fire hydrants
    into giants. The bare pine seller
    stands. The streetlights change
    for nothing. When I get to my door
    I'll reach for a key
    that opens & returns me
    to myself like a rune. Then I see
    I'm wearing a coat
    that isn't mine. Her syllables
    & smiles & the wit of another
    woman's neck lingering
    in the lining. Sweet-strange
    & irony & how you couldn't
    tell in the dark, you could wear
    something so intimate
    & otherwise? Hearing her
    hands & breasts & ribs
    murmur inside of the down.
    The feathers you now
    warm with your own
    body. Inseparable
    as the music we shared
    as we danced,
    the holiday like flecks
    of tinsel caught under
    the god's tongue. Julie,
    I hope you'll forgive
    me for wanting to
    verse your instrument,
    & how, when Brooklyn
    wasn't looking, I made
    angels against the air,
    our skin, like words slipped back
    before midnight & knowing
    I have no other way
    to bear my life, you
    laugh at the café
    where we meet
    & tell me
    when we give
    our coats back
    with wonder
    for ourselves
    that the dance
    was so lovely
    your legs hurt
    in the morning.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Lighting the Shadow by Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Copyright © 2015 Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Excerpted by permission of Four Way Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Four Way Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1935536575
• ISBN 13: 9781935536574
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 118
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile