Shot heart and minor
humiliations — your landscapes
palimpsest over the accident
of mornings. My life
a voice that carries a more useless
voice inside. We used
to doze like dogs in mirrored sleep
and mirrored sickness,
synchronized down to the cough
in each cell. All this kept
debris of a person — ill-fitting bone
cast, still-incurable line
of questions. Doll-dumb, unafraid
of what placed me twice
into flickering coma, chemical
slumber, flown not
to Pluto but the soft carbon dark
that curves around it. Close
but incalculable. A form of drowned.
Curl of a fixed palm
but colder than. On the outskirts
of your shadow
there trembles an injured ship
lifting a lonesome
curtain’s blue, a bed lacquered
in brine. Scallop
shell, Venusian birth — becoming
kinder matter. I try my luck
and new lung there. I hold my tongue
and true love there.
Click here to read Louie Leyson on the origin of the poem.
Image by Abdullah Ahmad on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
Louie Leyson:
“Venus, Undone” and its pictures follow a sputtering dream logic, twin to the paths that light up the mind when remembering a person. Images rarely hold an inherent narrative reasoning — it’s human impulse to arrange them in a way that approximates a story. “The Birth of Venus” inspires a universal recognition — that specific arrangement of ocean and woman, foam and shell, old and fixed image pinned to old and fixed meaning. The mind cannot dislodge that arrangement of items from their saltwater frame of association. This applies to so many public mythologies — Jesus on the cross, Medusa’s head of snakes, the violet-strewn waters of a young Ophelia — and applies also to the myths of private memory. Our inescapable safe of images, those world-obscuring veils. I’m reminded of someone I haven’t seen in years — still their body “palimpsests” over the landscapes of my life. We’d loved each other once. Debris of them clouds the morning birds. I’m trying now to wash love’s mud off the helmet of perspective. When in enmeshment with another person, their leaving can feel like an undoing of the self. In truth, while enmeshed I was never intact.
Louie Leyson is the recipient of a grant by the Canada Council for the Arts and was awarded a CBC Literary Prize in Nonfiction. You can find their works in Nimrod Journal, The Malahat Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere.
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