[poetry] Possession, Catríona O'Reilly

[kaberett]

That anxious way you have of closing doors
(like the brown of your eyes and hair)
was never really yours.
My arms and elongated nose were owned before --
fragments of jigsaw
in the rough art of assemblage whose end we are.

Sometimes I don't know where we live
or whose voice I still
hear and remember
inside my head at night. In darkness and in love
we are dismembered,
so that the fact of our coming to at all

becomes a morning miracle. Let's number
our fingers and toes again.
Do I love you piecemeal
when I see in your closing hand a valve-flower
like a sea-anemone,
or is it our future I remember, as the White Queen

remembered her pinpricked finger? All of you
that's to be known
resides in that small gesture.
And though our days consist of letting go --
since neither one can own
the other -- what still deepens pulls us back together.

Comments

[kaberett]

In Staying Alive (edited by Neil Astley), this follows immediately after This Be The Verse. That's where I first met it; I didn't remember that context while I was groping for enough of the first line to be able to find the rest of it (second person? third? gender?).

Somehow I am surprised by how queer it is. Surely I must have noticed that before?

(I have been greeting a lot of people, in writing, over the past few days, with "hello hello!" -- itself an echo, Papa through the line of years.)

[radiantfracture]

I like this a lot -- the rhythm always risking getting away from itself, and how unsparing it is, except that sudden kindness in the very end.

[kaberett]

Yes.

[vass]

<3

[lokifan]

Gorgeous!