Orphan Fire

ORPHAN FIRE

poems

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By ALISSA VALLES

Four Way Books

Copyright © 2008 Alissa Valles
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-884800-87-0

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Chapter One

Orphan Fire i Not a god's weapon of mass destruction, just a flint spark driven up a dry hillside, on Ararat of course, let into the stables like a stray animal to share at the trough, until an intruder stealing a horse saw it and thought he could make it work for him down in the brothels of humanity; now anyone can touch it: junkies, canteen cooks and poets, and for them it consumes its own origins, air, eagerness and brightness; twice orphaned, by gods and by earth, just to give bodies of clay an hour's warmth ii Constant fire, passing into the created world loses track of its source and destroys its end, coming to know three kinds of life form: pain of landscape, pain of language, pain of love. A sea becomes a river, a cry becomes a word, a "vivid thing in the air," the air around you. iii [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] so the closest you get to the first cause is this thirst, the nearest you get to purity is the pain of division, the hook of a nurse's arm pulling you out, the hook of a harpoon pulling you in iv I lie in a glass box naked, turned to the light. Taken out at intervals and fed someone else's time: at top speed, from one socket to another. The week ends with two candles held together. From this beginning, there arises a question, or a series of questions opening out of each other. I hope to have the chance to speak about other, more radiant forms of being in the near future. But first a dream: flakes of cloud, descending, catch fire when they touch the skin. It must be matched by another heat from inside yourself. Is it true there is a clock buried in each of us? That love can take the form of telling the time from somebody else's skin, but without hands? v You wanted a pure island language blind to the world like a tree's root but you drew a slip of paper saying: a word like a hand that could reach and touch the face of an angry child, a dying man, and now you can't find a word in any language that would both bind a man to his own world and lead him, trusting, into another. There may be such a word, but how to know to whose body it's attached, from what world it is reaching out? vi Atomic Love Poem The night sky with its cast of stars shows the dailies for the production free of charge to everyone involved The warmth left in a seat on the bus proves, against all odds, the raging of some inextinguishable furnace How even the dirtiest gutter rivulet watched by a bum on the pavement implies the wild liberties of oceans Written on the inner slope of a teapot in the color of brick and dried blood: a secret tribal history of mankind If this be so, why then from among all the fantastic conflagrations do I choose what claims to be you? vii Body Map of water and shame, ardent junk, congress filled with the arguments of chemicals Echo chamber for the cries of stubborn generations, all the quaint invisibles death has grown a beard on Maze and flame, factory where decay's people clock in, philosopher-clown blowing a whistle at each epiphany Washed by the rough nurse, morning, wheeled into the wards of afternoons, feeds exhausted on the broth of dusk Reads the erratic cards of dreams turns on insomnia's rack, breaks into the safe of sleep Loses its name in foreign embraces, forges a passport to a country of tenderness, gestures like a child at the thing that it wants, opaque from its own breath on the glass viii There, where you turn left at a bridge and follow a path's descent to water, there, where pines are bitten by frost in a valley unsheltered by mountains, an oak holds winter in its black arms, unmoving, yielding nothing to the eye and grey angels are raking the needles; there, where a river moves under the ice, and the flash of a kingfisher is the only measurement of time, and where breath rushes forward like an animal staying always just ahead of the hunter, it was there I left from, a lighter in my pocket & my body ran like Io down continents ix In the beginning the word move, a silent meal, portraits of ancestors, code books and knives; you descend the rusting river slowed by bends, you sleep, a sparrow in the shape of its flight. Gods' names lose their vowels, rituals harden; drying like fossils, words sleep out in the cold. When it comes time to move again, off you run waving (slow motion) the long end of a curse. Leave lightly as you arrived all those years ago. x Leaving a house on fire what did we take? A suitcase full of smoke & untranslatable jokes, words on ice, tongues torn from it, confidential papers giving off a fragrance of dry grass and salt, inflammable sheets, a broken clock, a guidebook to the species, the fur of a nocturnal animal, some names. xi Esther Running by columns of lament, past dim gold and iron chains, joy goes begging underground like an angel without a dowry, and trips at the feet of a street preacher singing desire shall fail. She, Esther, is justice's date, with a face already turned to fire; here where the highway ends, and a dead fly is wiser than you - leave your stilts here, go get lost, that is the way to your book. xii Later arrow that flew out from the soul No hill, no house, nothing here to say I. To see the world one obliterates oneself; naked film bathing in the acid darkness. In a field, an arrowhead still draws blood. Death left its refuse, nests of human hair. Which heaven? Sight's edge, light's husk. xiii In the same lowland landscape where your grandfathers lost their last fistful of religion, you go looking for them. Corn still summons the scythe, stones still court heights, but the new sword, feather-light, falling, makes no sound. Between an imperial coin and the gaping skull of a horse ants drag a dragonfly's wing, a last illustration of Darwin. Lyrical grasslands frame the greyish foreheads of cities overgrown train tracks run alongside the shallow ditches where before a passing eye the nettle-centurions bloom, ratifying ceaselessly the pact of beauty with destruction. xiv Today I didn't bathe or dress or speak, didn't read the paper or answer letters; didn't work very much, maybe an hour to placate the spiteful god Anonymous. A house not mine was filled with light. I walked the hallways talking to myself; a butterfly, finding its way into a room, beat its wings to shreds against the pane. I would have told you if you'd been here. You were saying that quattrocento angels always seem surprised at nature's cruelty, and this an advantage we had over them: a cynical knowledge that helps us endure. Today I wanted to ask - endure as what? All day, cargo boats passed on the river; gulls clipped the wide water like a ribbon. Nothing surprises us; only beauty, a ribbon, marks the distance between us and salvation. xv Sun pours from a pitcher of cloud, a bus stands still at an intersection: a woman kicks a crouching body (dog or child), its howl runs out. A fire held to the world's tongue. Freedom begins to conceal itself. We spoke other languages before but they weren't necessarily better. xvi I lie under the winter, under a stone of cloud: already the snow is being fitted to my throat like the shirt an angel once laid out for Blake. The mice are all my company; they occasion doubt as to the sovereignty of my own mind, the idea that man is a measure of everything. The mice ate half a long white bread; now I'll feed the rest to birds returning across the lake. I can see the folds of a child's dress, imitating wings in bold flight, without memory of a fall. xvii Fear Against your spine it once hugged you -you clung to it as if it were a brother, it seemed to know something important Quickly vain intelligence turned it to ice and you wondered if it in fact might be your heart and what fuel it could be fed, how it could be melted down and yield tears the right words or even a melody before the glacier reached your throat xviii He brings his songs from another country and even they are borrowed. Dancing, he weeps. Dancing, he grows angry. The next journey will be brief. Dancing, he laughs. xix So far it is my eyes, my judgment and my searching that speak these words to you Water washing the lining of bodies and countries, war games of whales, your pale nurse eucalyptus, the science of goodbyes, laws of cities, irregular verbs, a river circling a lake, a man selling leather I'll tell you but first please tell me to what oracle I pay tribute, who is speaking through me, whose fire and invective, hands washing sheets, in whose sky-a nest of light lasting no more than a second hide and seek in a cemetery is all you know a branch brushing glass a hand touching a wall xx Draft for a Psalm Night sky, voyaging stars, distant space: I can't hear what you're saying. A drunk is singing in the yard, a cat chasing prey, a woman groping along a crumbling wall. I prefer a gull's scream, empty and clean, when the sea wind reaches into its throat and a boat pulls away from shore, though what is real is neither purity nor distance but the place on the wall someone's hand wore away, a cat's eye, a drunk's sleep. Night sky, voyaging stars, distant space: guide me, instruct me, inhabit my voice.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from ORPHAN FIRE by ALISSA VALLES Copyright © 2008 by Alissa Valles. Excerpted by permission.
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