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Ana Bozicevic-Bowling |
What follows oranges
Later, an evening father
comes through the lake
and the thicket, to the door of his
chest
to pull him down flights
of pain and water.
One dream in two sleeping heads
(Back in her apartment, he talks until she sleeps.
There he continues. They walk down into the galleries.)
In these hallways
each word
had its own frame:
each word was almost an animal,
breathed in the frame
like in a burrow.
Look, he said. The colors of words
did not have the value of color:
blue meant the rain, and when
he asked, Why
the blue face, it was
a restaurant chair
left out
in the downpour.
Look, he said. Hush
deepened in the galleries.
They were close to dawn. The snow
of an unpeopled
world
dusted the frames.
In the ringing stillness
(he steps aside to show her: a
statue, egg held between its fingers.
Tells her this is her body.
Under the one sleeping upstairs.)
He sings the charm of Gradiva’s creation
I start by trying
to shape your origin:
I coat you with my own childhood.
There: your stone head
parts red nylon shades around
a single bed;
you stare at your palms between
two dwarf
formica toycarts.
What have you done, what’s being
done to you? Who
is the wax remembered you?
I press
you further down. Into the
dreamed
place, the kitchen-church
where daily objects
grow from the dirt. The benches
and beakers shine blackly
with making, with the windy
nothing-meaning
that shows through trees and sky
like an undershirt. Do you
not hear those blank
seams in any word
enough times repeated?
I build a room for you here
with the first bottom-tools of making:
a pink room, like the roof
of my mouth. You
will be a tongue
and speak the words I move you by.
You are a patient, I say,
in a hospital ward, waiting
for me like for the paper,
an orange.
(Years later, in a
history book)
Early devotions
Embraced, she’d start and shiver, flame-like
still filled to overflow with charred
snow, the childhood in the provinces
They first met in a tree: she was the sap
he the bark or leaf, oneness shadowing
the room where mother expected her
The screech of tram tracks heard through sleep
changes key
from metal to wool—memory—then
snow
Like the moveable hinge
on which the dream of mothers opens
into a dream of the father
They met in winter, locked eyes through old pockets of air:
it
thinned, grew unbreathable
The bent streets rainy commas
squeezed between blocks of mute peopled word
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