RILKE VOICE
I remember having no control
More difficult than any angel wherever she may be caught
In whatever breast in whatever
Blue pink yellow light
In gladiator light
*
The prodigy I held so close
I said close to her heart her country reminds me of Y2K
Even then it shouldn’t be Glenn Gould all the time
Mary Robison, the second elegy at Duino or the computer
Plus whatever I had to say to you a year ago
*
Singing Turandot at night in the snow
Singing Turandot outside like a bot
To all the rich people dressed as punks on the train at rush hour
The angel’s stuck in a hole in a leaf
Snagged on some edge
Like when I try to remember everything I love
And love is back
*
That Connecticut lady won’t shut up
Less than a year has passed
And it will happen again
I would tell you about it
Pushing you to Antarctica
In the free museum wheelchair
Being so mean to you
*
We can’t deny back there we felt closer
To where we are going than now
When we saw the painting with the angels in the rafters
You said that one is just a spear of light
The others were babies
Parts of babies with wings
A head
And you said we are happier than they are
Than everyone
And it felt like standing on a cliff
*
Half the time Coco doesn’t understand the words themselves
Half the time only meaning eludes her
I feel inside I will transform
And you can justify anything by connecting it to Ashbery
There is no one to talk me out of it
As one of us has to eat, clean, receive and give away money
*
If a photograph exists
It can’t really be rare
At Duino I could call on something Italian too
My mom’s friend Carmine
From the middle of the Earth
The sin cake eater
I’m fighting over who should buy the cigarettes
*
What’s the youngest you’ve ever been
And the youngest you could bear being again
At Duino I could isolate looking for you from abstract looking
And on top of the hand is the underhand
*
I miss other people more
They are hosing things down
So smart
So today when they hose down the chicken warehouses
I’d like to be a complete idiot or a complete anything
In the first clips of sunlight
*
In the sun is a metal circle
Turning into a dance that goes around
There is a premonition in language of the never ending pain
Eclipsing itself
Out on the moors
It fractures and that is totally fine
On the moors
The female schooner captain died today
The gay cool female schooner captain
*
Katelyn said not that road
There will be a morning
And a road that makes you feel better about yourself
*
Dancing with the romaine lettuce devil
Sitting on the seawall with the man who killed the mayor
Emily Dickinson’s Poems as She Preserved Them
I told Andy he had these and other unspeakably dark forces to thank
For all the LA modern architecture he’s obsessed with
That’s how drunk I was
Mitya Pyotr 1 Pyotr 2 Dmitri Petroshka Your Name
I do this to myself
*
Listening to music and watching TV at the same time is impossible
A teenager told his girlfriend on the train this morning
Trying to fill holes
Frantic and ecstatic must come from the same place
When you take out the Christian myths
The angels are still in the rafters
Hanging over the empty barn
Stray clumps of hay
Dust
A dog
*
If one person can sing three songs at once
There could be more songs than ears
If you want to be hysterically funny
Write out the logic of anything
*
When I sing I’m just saying
The question does the begging
People are not special
Being alive is special
Leonard Cohen yelling
In the end we give up customs we barely had time to learn
That is what hysterical light made me think of
*
Goodnight my love
I am trying to read six books at once
Some people change and some don’t
That is not a literary device
Some people learn something
1-800-HURT
In this way it is like a garden
Or an aquarium where some flowers live by accident
There is nothing spectacular about a show of hands
Fuck a Whitmanic list
I always say
We are supposed to somehow give things to each other
Without taking anything away
*
I saw a kid dabbing and flossing
At the Hilma af Klint show
I told my pre-verbal children how night time is pointless
I read the Duino Elegies at the top of my lungs
And yes they cried out for someone else
*
Lost beyond the resources of talk
I took the path of things so mysterious we shouldn’t bother with explaining
To play a heavy metal song of love
Fires
When I asked is there not something like Greek tragedy
But now
*
I pursued my obsession with shame and confusion
He is a nice person and he’s not addicted to drugs anymore
So that’s even better
So you feel what I want maybe it could be transitive
Oh no
This is what I meant about not taking anything away
Silver at the gills with facts about the Cold War
Silver in the bouncy balls at Wal-Mart
*
To the bridge that fell
You were the worst bridge
*
Something to suck water out of the ground
Intimate like the only self
They are out there, along the highway
In summer
My mom called me an evil weed smoking thug
And you’re distracted talking to a friend in the backseat
About nothing in particular
A child who knows poems is just a child who knows poems
Already too many of those
Something was lying to you
*
The youngest thing you could imagine
Give me a gold coin
When I sing I’m just trying to make a dog cry
Courtney Bush is a poet, filmmaker, and preschool teacher from Mississippi. Her chapbook Isn’t this nice? is available from blush_lit.