Jennifer Moxley's Imagination Verses (Tender Buttons, 1996; Salt, 2003)

I could have grown tall,

but I awoke to no words and wonder left.

"Home World"

...equal measures

of air and earth

came to me

precious enough,

I wore them

well knowing

my thoughts

would think me

hollow, exiled

to the abandoning

company

of all

my illusory 

ends.

last lines of "Ode on the End"

(double spaced in the original)

down that rabbit hole my liege

I'm a camera gathering brightness

"Bi-coastal Fleshings"

Were we the land's

before we were landed?

"The Winged Words"

Where is my field of wheat,

my flock, my ocean,

my arsenal, my knight errant.

"Ode on the Son"

I dreamt

a petal's depth of hatred

            hovered at my ear

while vagaries worked

            to rough me up.

*

                  A girl,

I have seen tragedy

      consider being

such as we are.

"Ten Still Petals"

and know again

there's a place for us, and such

a country.

end of "Underlying Assumptions"

(double spaced in the original)

Come along, you can join us 

if you lose that proclivity 

for worship--any medium size

planet will do. Just think,

four walls and a microwave

could really keep us busy.

end of "Studio Life"

(doubled spaced in the original)

I grow phallic

with each dissemination

"The Removal of Enlightenment Safeguards"

It's as if to be real

you and I must garner backers

without a rib to call our own.

We make ripples

with daily effort and then suddenly

flood the place with anger.

opening lines of "Ode to Protest"

(double spaced in the original)

enough

ignorance

to fell unclouded truth, truth

like a tunnel to the heart

            fluttering

*

punished dreamer

failed redeemer

man, or country

"The Ballad of Her rePossession"

(double spaced in the original)

...in the frozen field of aim, beside the gift of all intention

            perhaps I'll cry away the day

            perhaps I'll choose a different wreck

perhaps I'll live this appalling destiny

                  in the economy of night.

the end of "Wake"

(double spaced in the original)

I suspect the water's edge is enamored of the water,

a quiver on the surface tells me not the wind

but the wish to drift will devastate the sand.

It is the future's focal infection, this insistence on death, 

like when my mother and father cradled me

as the answer to each other's desperate tread towards union.

For this is a universe where things are not apparent

in their cruelty, but continual, and the sweetness of order

is increasingly evanescent. If I could hide this day forever

from the pleasure of renewal and banish all contingency

from happening I would, but I have never seen planet X

or the wooden ships on the Eastern horizon.

Up until now my life has faced West, sequestered

reason reaching for an injudicious kiss.

second and final stanza of

"The Waver in the Orbit of Uranus Becomes Unexplainable"

...we have built what we imagine

others building. Behind other

summer-lit windows 

there must be wall paper

worth waking up to....

*

                                    It was

the year the phones went dead

on Mother's Day, though most mothers

preferred fully realized human potential

to letters home or regular calls.

"Lucky So and So"