'Limelight' and Other Poems, by D.M. Rice
Limelight
When I was younger I was a renegade
To the true muse, but not for lack
Of worship, there at the altar of
Myself I bit the moments clean
Of their quality, and sought
To impress what wisdom might
Determine. I would bum cigarettes
With Virgil. We would talk like old
Mates. "I especially like these poems
About war. What beautiful moments
Where these soldiers stoop about
The killing field gap jawed at what
They'd done to survive." "That is
Not the subject of my poetry,
At all. My only subject is the pliant
State of beings. An infant held by the jaws
With pulling hands twisting our dignity twain."
I became a poet : I would sweat teardrops
And drink the vastness of the ocean.
My blood became the rhythm of observation
, quick ebullient flickers on the ashen fresco.
I sat between Dante and TS Eliot, who I imagined
Kissing, but had yet to conjure the scene myself.
They accepted my conceit in good faith.
It was nice we all spoke the same language.
But our mingling was interrupted, by Plath
And Emily Dickinson. "We are always being
Forgotten," they spoke in unison, but I could
Trace the intricacies of their tone and timbre.
I had forgotten the need for epic,
The fragmentary terra cotta gambols
Of modernism were like Lutheran fate to me.
The Christian god sighed fish and loaves while
Robert Duncan twisted my hair, as I eyed Frank
O'Hara on the catamaran, tossing blithely at sea.
We discovered Plato's gate to hell in the Cave of
The Sybil, and mocked the demons for their vanity.
The diaspora of eternal recurrence,
A philosopher's stone of extant lamentations.
I wanted for peers, but not for parents, as Goethe
And Kafka inspected my shoelaces and taught
Me to drink deep in the frozen wasteland.
I had forgotten to be lapsed, only following
The muses in their waning determination
To persist, again, as the threshold of all
Creation seeks Freudian excitation. Being
As wisps of clouds made grandiose through distance.
Faces broken open by the vulnerable exactitudes what speed foregoes
Velocity. French tyrants personally overseeing
Baudelaire and myself, chained to a crude
Depiction of the last supper. Finally, I thought,
Holding Sir Philip Sydney in Diana's famèd grove
, this is what it means to want for nothing.
Mondi Thursday
March, surrealism drives the mount—
everyone, sinai and the shroud of turin
return, volvic and pugnacious night
eternal, floes of molten passion
death, erupting from the void
yes! the fractious blitz of nostalgia
this pale featureless coincidence,
hale ubiquity, unconscious cathexis
That were enough to say
he was formed of you, same
wide teeth and careful gait, picking
at his lips in likeness of you, body
much the same though less of you
to kiss the ground you tread upon
my life, in habits you, scars I cannot
see but which inhabit you, unfettered
by the superego's shame against self
slaughter, for the loss of you, and open
to obey the spite of you, an oblique
study in the formative delight in you
, and him who does resemble you
, such that dostoyevsky speaks
of substitution and doubling
with contingent faith we traipse
the holy place and share
what had been lost in you
, a secular devotion
to historical context
was the anglican woman
trite to call it 'holy thursday'
as if you had passed down
the word to me yourself?
or was it catholic
sacrilege I uttered
to unfurl the lineage
we share in these incestuous sheets
, shall you then become my sister
(or sibling––though the status
of your gender remains for me
an open question) ? ( I hope this is reciprocal in kind )
Should this loss of life compensate itself into doppelgänger love?
Are bodies interchangeable in the darkness of the theatre
in which we sit exchanging quips, spontaneously holding hands?
And with the depth of my experience I tread slowly, with deliberate
care to not step again onto the same unhallowed ground.
Scenes from Inverness
Early morn insomnia
fleeting loss—anticipation
planning lines to dull
the afternoon sleep
with nowhere to be
until evening dawns
on me the perennial
acumen, finally still
after the irritant day
, even the coughing
has settled in my
fabricated sociability
, murder sleep, do
you not see there
what vexes me?
Banquo, turn these
bloody hands as pure
as snow, the foil tincture
burns black eyes and chrysalis.
Mediated astral projections
take the dull roots of embodiment
up by the belt loops and out
into no end.
We Will Always Love
So grating. So angry. Cuffed jeans. The intimations of mania. grim reception. Particulates. New losses. Absentia. Collective actions. Sundering black. Survivor's guilt. Missed connections. A depth erased. Desperation in the way he held you. Unnoticed pity. Dysphoria. Antecedents like hollow bullets. Bedsheets caked with vaginal discharge. Disowned fairy boy, standing on the roof of the library. Blue serenity. Midnight vows, hastily taped to the cigarette catcher. Clean lungs. Selfless, beatifying kisses. Never your type. Crying at church in Childress, OK. Godless miracle. Reading about life in distant cosmos. Regurgitated gender roles, kaleidoscopic in their insensibility. Never mind. Dissonant jazz. Cheap cologne. Flowers growing by the train track. The constellations on your back, gorgeous melodies of form. Disappearing behind the curtains after your monologue, having left no secret your wish to die. Two finches in the bell tower, not used in 100 years. Forums for the insane and anti social. Not enough klonopin in the entire world. Demarcations language fails to set asunder. Life and death. Stasis and eternity. Bird and Diz, wine drunk in the common room. The other woman. The other man. Non binary obsessive. Agender panromantic. Signifying nothing. The lost breath of what should be, but isn't. Any more.
Easter Sunday
What have you given up?
So whimsical fog won lustre
by the stone's light blighted
by the river's ineffable grasp
by candlelit tightrope framing
a tender flesh consumed
by the wine stained in unison
by stringent variations upon
a delicate condescension
by idle winds spilling forth
a cradled repetition.
D.M. Rice is the co-eic of Sybil. Their first collection, Moby Pussy, is available on the site.