Joshua Coery, Selah

Joshua Corey, Selah, Barrow Street Press, New York, 2003

The Ladder

Plug of saltwater taffy in the cheek—
sweet bridge to the play of white light

on water: lakelight, sealight,
riverlight, bathlight. Dark waters

open at the head and close. The child’s body,
slick, emerges—the beach of days

torches a horseshoe crab
upside-down on the strand, displays its

bleached bowl of knives, shattered clock. Years later,
pale in every pore, the raven

on starched sheets raises our arms—
dark waters open at the head

and close. Kneeling in baptismal grass—
our eye of water in the barley—I saw

black shot bodies of crows—what can’t
be reached is god. Where did the doctors

disappear—up the gulled staircase?
Who grinds the temple fathers silent

in their sepulchers? A molar of sugar, blades, and salt
hurtling backward plucked by flesh into

dark waters open at the head and closed.


Halo, the Affair

Her hair was my bouquet of calf-
skin gloves. It glowed like butter
turning bad—yet to me she is beautiful still.

She had my pharaoh round her neck,
too weak to bring his hands together.
My scurvy songbird, my ransack life.

Her eyes peeled way in a hush
of hydrangea—perfumed tug
of the Hollywood Hills. She was

a beautiful goddamn. She liked
to sketch me with her pencil;
she licked her pencil

and put a black clot of fists
on newsprint. She licked my fingers
and her necklace groaned. Truly, truly,

for all the days of internal medicine
she was my groat’s worth of writ,
a millionth of dependence—foe

offered the moon, doctor
of really indifferent dish. Rays
bounced of the disks of mare—truly,

all I imagined lived with me
and was my love. My limp tolerated,
even the grass under my arms.

My beloved persists abducted,
prone on a metal gurney
shelved with out-of-stock phrases,

a song where her lips did hang.
Fr’instance: beloving is my dead
red rose’s waltz and hoses and O—


Eine Welt Aus Klange
[Notes: The title of “Eine Welt Aus Klage” (“A World from Lament”) is taken from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes”.]

My Lament, I’m sorry. But I can’t play cat’s cradle
forever with your tension lines. Electric grease abrades me.

Wouldn’t you rather just broadcast from your bunker
and let the teenagers tune you with their braces?

You yourself are lovely—do you recall
how once we disported together on the meadow at Auvergne?

You posed for me—panting I sketched from behind
your callipygian superstructure, not daring to embrace you

before the German picknickers. You smile.
I feel your flesh everywhere, stretched to its limit—

the overcast sky is your tone I’m receiving,
your pleasures are mine—achieved intimacy of brook,

mackerel gleam—like you suspended in clarity, between crystals
of unrecovered meaning, forty fathoms of gold—:

I see me in your nacreous eye. Forgive, my Complaint.
I’ll tune only to your breakwater.

—I’ll be the liquid you need to build yourself from sand.


Eyeless in Gaza

Every morning I march across the icy meadow, breaking the outstretched fingers of reeds, cold mud sucking my toes. Reading from right to left, spindling, airlifting letters across the field. The phrase is a pincer, a pair of tongs in my hands. If a man falls on his back and waves his arms it’s an angels seen from above. If he falls on his face and the snow covers him, the page turns.

shag-sheared spruce branches : dusk

shaved scalded crystals by night : fire

If I’m a man writing a letter to you the letter becomes your leaf. Press it between your own pages in the chill of the vault where you read it. If I could make a new letter in the snow you might see it from above. If I cold speak the language you forget by day you might hear me in the tv. Where you are there’s many skinny fathers hunched rocking over the body of the law, lips moving. You stand outside the circle holding your colored silk. You pull a scarf over the eyes of your naked father. His lips are moving.

paper it makes a poor blanket : sparks

Outside the circle where you are there’s nothing. Inside there’s a fire in a brighter circle of snow. The fire’s on the pole of the sun, the snow’s blanket is an orbit. You drag a burned branch from the center and write its charcoal on the snow.

dark drafts crumpled in the meadow : earth

We live in a body but not together. You are not the law but its loophole. I am not the running rabbit but its lawyer. I find your body in mine where you pull a scarf across my eyes.

kalender of angel’s oversight : air

You wave your burning branch at my bent back. Speak! Still I am silent in the face of the burning law.

black crepe ashed at its edge : morn

Each seized cinder is a thermal. From a helicopter the meadow is the center of succeeding rings. Each has the same unmasking white center. One woman can stand there and turn around slowly.

snow milks the eyes white : silk

the tinfoil sky crumples in : melody



The Cyclops

She would like to free her ankle
to reach a roof
under trafficking stars.

She would like to pass between mirrors—
advertisements for death—
and see a wing flutter

in the corners of her eye.
But the tea is hot and random
and brilliant with milk.

The handle cinches round her finger
snug as a metal band—
flakes of sugar on her lips

scar to sexual light.
In the aquarium
she did not know she was beautiful.

—Song of the hydroptic lens.
A fist knocks on the glass,
pastry crumbles in the air.


The Blazing World, Is It Ours

I speak spark to the sun—
when I lie the body listens. I am the body’s

only burden—there is nothing else.
When I entered the pure cold, I said

farewell to precious stones. I offered up my nectar.
I walked one foot beneath the sea.

My outstretched arms gather
subatomic slowness. The flesh is always virgin

and mind—the rest if offal, horrible legs,
the sunbaked crab sidling in its shell.

Innovative crustacean, toward your objects
I flinch in sleep, awaking

red-walled rooms of self. Remanded once again
to rhetoric’s blue, too-buoyant planet.


Third//Goddess

I saw your nakedness,
your wine-thought
created me. Half-

breasted in the bath,
a birth in the air
bursting primal scene.

A lot of talk’s
plain scarred song.
A rage we eyed.


Sixth//Blue Danube

Attila Attila
in Budapest streets
child swaps meats

Attila Attila
she’ll hide in the air
till smoke meets her stare

Attila plus one
when father finds forest
she’ll miss her fun

Attila plus two
mother’s plum wine
in her veins slough

Attila plus three
a storebought nun
what she made for me

Judit Attila
history makes mud
what passes for blood

your red chamois bag
your kindle-white stag





Je b[a]tis ma demeure

I build my dwelling on the beach

the rack of tides spins beneath my floor glassy aureoles surrounding the light of lifeboat

creatures / anemones / tentacles steps to the sand

a headless shark a horseshoe crab

gray stains on the shore the moving finger
writ analgesic


at low tide I collect these things and bring them back

above the sand ma demeure est un mus[e]e des r[e]ves / of childish tsunami

helpless with urgency I arrange the exhibits

bust of Lincoln the Dead Sea scrolls

strands of kelp a Grecian urn

an ice cube tray hemlock


you’ll find me easily / the number’s written in water


can’t feel my toes when

the winter sea / smothering through alcohol’s clear basement an underwater garden

while the waves knock on the door when guests are turned away