Jennifer Militello's Body Thesaurus (Tupelo, 2013), second selection

A second and final selection of favourite passages from this book:


                      Never and always sleep so close
their hair intertwines and tangles as they twist.

*

         Sometimes this means ignoring the nudity
of a quiet day.

from "The Smoldering Hand"

As it is, I am rich with different versions of myself, and I do not know an antidote for me.

from "Autobiography toward a Study of a Thousand Wounds"

The corridors of me whisper with chains.

*

                              I pass through ghosts 

of my own gone self. The little winds

that are its pulse.

from "Autobiography with God Complex and Epidemic"

How the sleep came, a downdraft

of birds.

 from "Autobiography in Not-Song and October"

                              The impossible strings

of pearls I once believed were days.

from "What Cultivation Means"

Welcome to changing everything. Welcome to starving

out of sleep. By morning, weariness will have replaced

the jawbone of a thinned and willful sky.

This illness is savage. These clouds, they are scythes.

end of "There Remain New Branches"

They kept evolving unpredictable results, found a vertigo of snakes and called it the mind, found time and called us its puppets.

from "Antidote with Attempts at Diagnosis"

What hooks you breaks you. Rides you clean.

*

Blessed are those for whom the sound of memory has a sharpness of violins.

          They shall feel scaffolding deep in the blood.

Blessed are those who walk a shoreline while its whispers swarm.

          Meaning is a bird call in the interim.

from "Antidote with Beatitudes"

                              It is not the trait

of an inherited gene, it is not inherited:

it is ours to take. What being means

is a trick that brightens. One finds oneself

queen among the dead. One finds oneself draped

in ashes and made. The shapes of rain and

candid lenses. The facts of hammer and grease.

end of "Wholeness Is an Imagined State"

At the time of this posting, Foyle's has Body Thesaurus for 35% off.