Amanda Nadelberg
from Record
Of what had come
we’d already erred, so I lit the door
before the mystic who rattled on
toward what used to be morning
a weak argument for song.
And on a Thursday the news made me wary
the clock waving between summer
and however now would be
a plant resurrected in the rain,
the singer a memory, the song
some ambivalent anthem. I’ll have
a go at it with you: there’s a dead moon in the hall,
flowers and bells, a scene for what wills
collecting imaginations in the twenty-first century.
To write another poem in the lung of invented scenes
we divest of love in its most open forms.
Counting the wind in the time before us, the spirit waves.
And of the instants I’ve understood it’s this
to know a way to put light back from behind your eyes
into the bowl singing a life /
dreamed from the cost of a year.
It cannot suffice to say I dressed myself in the fashion of my petite heart, a defense against men I need not
know again. I fasted belief in the field of synonyms under some alternate moon.
The twelfth measure offered a place for us in the occult,
a fault of language to hire steady hands and your
particular feet as the stewards of day
in which walking thought governed the effects
of speech. It worked until it won’t. Shadow blue basket
hop, I’ll tell you when you woke
o'er day in any company we keep,
a hide of paisley rounds until it besets
what proves to be simple happenstance
of sand that comes into the house
from shoes that have been to the beach.
There’s no other version of memory to roll under the vessel of day.
Call your parents. Invoke the dead. Bring your wilds to the river and run.
Conceive another life to absolve the one you’re in.
On my way to then, in an arbor of thrown logic / I constructed days
and set the order of original sums at the edge of a house lined with light and magic.
Amanda Nadelberg is the author of three books: Isa the Truck Named Isadore, Bright Brave
Phenomena, and Songs from a Mountain. She lives in Oakland.