The Hunters Enter The Scene
The day cast a spell
Where by ascending so many stones
I could not leave the center garden
Where my children lay
Muttering about the hell mouth
Where a muscular sense of heaven
The bright depressive colors
Kept me tacked to the wall
In the space of the poem
The dogs will eat the unicorns
With their placid gore
Calm and sure of themselves, like time
Where the Bishop
With half his body missing
Holds his right hand
Perhaps in something like a peace sign
I ask my lover, where did the left go
His own head is rounded
With grotesque metals
His soul, a colorless glass
He has conquered his religion
With three inward fires
And when he sits in the room
Fits the figure of a king
He is a man of sorrows
Made of ferns and tiny succulents
Made of wood in the shape of fabric
Made of marble in the shape of wood
In him I remember another
Taking me to the olive tree
In the western arboretum
His refinement of stars
I thought of the ancient story
Where the two lovers turned into stars
I imagined a sort of magic
Of becoming an olive tree for all eternity
For my king, could I be more loving
I bring him my sour oranges
Piling and heaping orange fruit
All over my body
Draping russet red cloth
Over my endless hair
Anointing my body with figs
All just to make him love me
Burning what is between us
Into smoking angry holes
His beard no longer red and grey
But Jove-like and neon green
My love, he sits in tiny firs
Holding two cream serpents
They form a crown around him
And I kneel forever, and kiss his crown
What is life, but an endless purple fire
I draw my sword up into the air
It’s hard to admit cosmic love
If only he let himself be free
The Weather
We never thought it was the weather that wasn’t going to be ok
And instead worried about the bombs or our ice cream
We didn’t think everything could melt like this
But it did, and so quickly
I didn’t think the baby would leap out of the bed
When I had done everything to keep him bundled
But it happened right before my eyes
They all said: it’s your fault
So I apologized as much as possible
No one knew now, but I’d been apologizing since I’d been born
There’s a lot to be sorry for
Like this poem
I tried to stop myself from writing it
But it’s not poetry that’s the problem
And when I saw that I’d always be alone
I asked the snow to keep on falling
But I am the kind of person
Who can’t control everything
The earth landed on its head
And scurried away from us
And everything fell into a kind of hell of bright colors
DOROTHEA LASKY is the author of seven books of poetry and prose, including Animal (Wave Books, 2019). Her poems have appeared in the Paris Review, The Nation, and The New Yorker. She is currently an associate professor of poetry at Columbia University School of the Arts, where she directs the poetry program.