Don’t Choke in the Orchard

“Reading the poems of this period is like watching someone take a long breath and begin to write with her own blood. While the temptation is to seek precise biographical sources for this outpouring, the appropriate response is awe.”

— Brenda Hillman (Brenda Hillman, “Editor’s Preface,” in The Pocket Emily Dickinson: Edited by Brenda Hillman, published at Boulder, Colorado by Shambhala in 2024; page xiii.)

“Among the vocations of the Faustian personage—wizards and witches, necromancers and sorcerers, even writers and scientists—the artist remains the most predisposed to the infernal. […]Tell me that there isn’t a bit of the sulfurous about artists.”

— Ed Simon (Ed Simon, “Chapter 7: Faust Is an Artist: Christoph Haizmann and the Infernal Painting,” in Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, published at Brooklyn by Melville House in 2024; page 138.)

                         i.

Shut me up in a house of pearls,
blaze me easy as a star,

you’re too expensive and I’m too explosive, widower
away with window eyes all haze

and blue buzz my borrowed name, tarnished as
a lantern that refuses to know

its own warmth thrown out to grow, as
a line drawn is a key,

so too is a circle squared in its
failure, trafficking in gridlocks, how often

my intentions end up blocked by the shapes
of sound hollering silences across these

muted pages, until I get better bear with
this hieroglyphist in his letter, unfettered

exhibiting exorcistic qualities, in scandal-lite, vanishing into ashes
of desire, as those who hurry

                         ii.

fear time, so is a gaze held, for
the wound and its meaning are

in the same place, feet like water on
a path of paper retrace our

errors, dissolve promises wrought half-gall, half-iron, devised some
lifetime ago for us to part

so as to go through solo, so low
alone, to plummet into the well

of purple eternities until echo upon echo swells
as though bruise were ink and

hurt worth its tell, each ache a mimic
of worry we refused to speak,

unanointed in the bare light of lechery’s brazen
blaze, molten sweat milked by kisses

from tongued flesh melts breath to vapour whispers
carry over beds, determined to end

                         iii.

imprisoned behind lips another stranger baits for the
tryst, drop bone-by-bone every lie of

me these vultures intone, truth be told, perhaps
the relic of a saint in

a script that vanishes as jewels adorn a
statue begin to sweat into puddles

of references which pool onto a carpet of
apologies across the silk of which

milked ego crawls until, trampled, the colour of
crushed skulls, moonlit falls allow ambitions

to be called downtrodden, wails echo as walls
carry the wait, where once acrypt was kept, under the carpet, beneath a
stone, in the floor, but the

stone is not the door, as the bowl
of heaven empties, then falls the

                         iv.

reflected face, god replaced by space man’s ache
made to fill, expressing the blankness

of an erased mask, my magnetism enough to
attract your knife in my back,

attached as I am to my wildly beating
heart, its bitter treatment heating a

story to sell, miserable, leaving our coffins at
night, a dead marriage my husbands

and I resurrect only to forget, together we
rise to defy vows a lust

loveless as this denies, our line’s blood is
very old wine, translation of the

ancient to the present is a resurrection, suffers
the desire it sings, tonguing crossesacross unholy flesh, sacrilege writing in licks unembellished
legends of unapologetic decadence, breath manipulating

                         v.

in sweat kissing spreads rude machinations manifesting nude
definitions of the deleterious effects of

crude sexual politics, resonances when the sun is
low, how shadows lengthen, testament to

how far more interesting it is, then, to
frame a film with the horizon

at the bottom, beneath the action, dramatic as
relegating the horizon to the scene’s

ceiling, revealing the focal point to be mortal
feeling, divinity’s pull in this world

so fleeting, movies meant, instead, to capture rather
than merely depict evidence of how

moments go on going by us even as
we go through them, art is

the only permanence, determining its own meaning since
every glimpse deceives by hiding beneath

                         vi.

reason what passion it is every artist’s intention
to fashion into a statement, the

purpose for a work’s making always changing even
after creation’s completion, altared egos big

as cathedrals belief in embiggens until, spiteful of
incubations, in the candle-light of midnight

lucubrations, cradles crumble and this genius child belittles
elders entreating him to be more

humble, unheeded as their bible’s warning, ‘Don’t choke
in the orchard,’ for, more than

it nourishes, the apple tortures, with an ancient hurt unsutured, throats being so open

about pasts your future intends to wound, torches
with burning burdens of words, punishments

          underscored: Without sheep’s clothes, wolves die from exposure.