by Lex Runciman
The Dreaming Tree
January 23, 2024
Snow at the End of the Year
November 06, 2023
God speaks to each of us
November 01, 2023
You are not surprised at the force of the storm
October 27, 2023
Lady Lazarus
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?—
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot—
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.
It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart—
It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
October 15, 2023
A Warm Day
Today the sun was shining
so my neighbor washed her nightdresses in the river—
she comes home with everything folded in a basket,
beaming, as though her life had just been
lengthened a decade. Cleanliness makes her happy—
it says you can begin again,
the old mistakes needn’t hold you back.
A good neighbor—we leave each other
to our privacies. Just now
she’s singing to herself, pinning the damp wash to the line.
Little by little, days like this
will seem normal. But winter was hard:
the nights coming early, the dawns dark
with a gray, persistent rain—months of that,
and then the snow, like silence coming from the sky,
obliterating the trees and gardens.
Today, all that’s past us.
The birds are back, chattering over seeds.
All the snow’s melted; the fruit trees are covered with downy new growth.
A few couples even walk in the meadow, promising whatever they promise.
We stand in the sun and the sun heals us.
It doesn’t rush away. It hangs above us, unmoving,
like an actor pleased with his welcome.
My neighbor’s quiet a moment,
staring at the mountain, listening to the birds.
So many garments, where did they come from?
And my neighbor’s still out there,
fixing them to the line, as though the basket would never be empty—
It’s still full, nothing is finished,
though the sun’s beginning to move lower in the sky;
remember, it isn’t summer yet, only the beginning of spring;
warmth hasn’t taken hold yet, and the cold’s returning—
She feels it, as though the last bit of linen had frozen in her hands.
She looks at her hands—how old they are. It’s not the beginning, it’s the end.
And the adults, they’re all dead now.
Only the children are left, alone, growing old.
July 06, 2023
Givens
June 02, 2023
[OD'd on his suboxone]
OD'd on his suboxone and not on purpose, opened in the kitchen dark a bottle
I thought was my own trifling med and took his drug instead, stop signs he called them,
helps you stop without insane withdrawal, but tells me now he just used it to deepen
his high, heighten his depths, he didn't care what he took or did or what combo
he imbibed, just ate up anything to make it better. Deader. I had no clue what I'd done
until later in bed my Self began to break into parts of equal measure like frames of film
unspliced and floating away from each other, alone, couldn't figure out how to use
the phone to call for help or to swallow my own spit, three days I sat up on the sofa
for fear of disremembering to breathe if I slept, him gone, out of his mind on dope
he tells me now, too hot for long sleeves and his arms covered in tracks so he
wouldn't come home for fear I'd see. On the third day, I returned to myself though
never all the way for I had glimpsed the oblivion he sought hourly for years, saw
I'd authored him in my bones, he was my allegory, analogy, corollary, mirror, I forged
his suffering, his nail, his needle, his thrill. Of course I swallowed the stupid pill.
June 01, 2023
[There's something to be said for having]
There's something to be said for having one plate, one spoon,
a fork, a dull knife, living out of a red suitcase, eating when
hungry, grabbing shut-eye when tired, you're high-natured,
Joyce James said to me when I lived in NYC, we were in a cab
on our Friday lunch break going to a record store, decades later
I see I was not high-natured, only wanted love, though what that
means I don't know, something about mystery, standing humbly
at the gate of someone else's mystery and hoping for the sound,
at least now and then, of the hinges turning, mystery now,
mystery then, as when I went up to a guy at the record store
to ask him who did the song "Refugee" and he said, "Me,"
and I realized after I found the album and looked at the photo
on the cover I'd asked Tom Petty who did a Tom Petty tune
I'd heard on the radio when I was hungry and tired and alone.