|
|
Archive of New Mexico Poetry – Anne Valley Fox
At sixteen, she knows a few things nobody else
can imagine. How boys have invisible wings &
voices like underground rivers. The things
might happen exactly as you imagine them.
& time is a spiral so nothing repeats itself, really.
She’s so smart she amazes herself; so dumb
sometimes it’s scary. The sky is an ocean
a person can learn to float in. The pot of gold
under a rainbow’s another thing people
misunderstand-they think it’s a story
for children. She opens her mind and colors
rush in: the world’s a fiesta, a banquet,
or sudden nightmare if gravity pulls to hard
on rigid matter. A chilled space may
break into splinters of light. Then
she picnics in full sun with the animals; then
there are streams running through her-fresh,
bubbling, anyone can drink from them
Return to top
She suffers from excess. Accumulation sits on her like homunculi.
Though something seems true, it refuses to fit the receptacles.
She weakens with time-or might this be the recovery room and
she’s groaning awake? She imagines boxcars crammed with families
bound for the ashes of Auschwitz; she thinks she would break, like
a disbelieving child. Events shatter illusion. Her country bombs a
nation of strangers; flexing muscle, it strangles a small republic.
She suffers because she knows her particular cruelty. She sucks
herself into a fist. Bled dry, love dies back like a winter garden.
She wears her teeth down devouring meat, close to the cannibal.
What but the body changes? Time and its ludicrous string of
tragedies sweeps her along; she claws at the blurred riverbank.
Around the globe, children are starving with flies at their eyes.
Now if we drink from our rivers and streams, we sicken and die.
She is paralyzed, in her mind’s eye, by a quilted blanket of comfort.
She longs for what she’s forgotten. She suffers for lack of gazing
into sky. Her friends are distracted; her lover induces amnesia.
The world of cyberspace chats up a storm-oh, excess of noisy
oblivion! The Buddha reminds we are manifestations of one being;
toxicity spills from humanity, oiling dolphins and fishes. Someone
proffers God. Her personal goddess stands aside in a gown gone
to rags. A voice off the ocean whispers: ’Your gaze hardens and in
the wrong direction!’ She suffers believing she plows exhausted soil.
If phenomenon is illusory, what can it mean to be human?
On and on, she grieves in her capsule.
She suffers because she thinks:
‘I am suffering.’
Return to top
About the Poet
Anne Valley Fox lives in El Dorado, New Mexico. These poems are from 10,000 Joys 10,000 Sorrows, published by Fishdrum Magazine.
|
|
