A Modern Woman in the Wild
praise songs from the tender wreckage
Tadarida brasiliensis, you are such a tiny thing.
Yet, next to you, I am nothing.
These long cures I toy with become boring.
These boys who fail to manipulate
us into loving them,
quieter than your quietest susurration
at the first millisecond of dusk.
•
Your flight stirs memories in me.
They slip through the blood vessels
like a million bits of glass.
I smell the oil and steel
of the Santa Cruz trestle
that connects the Beach Flats to Seabright.
The sleepy drummer beats behind my eyes*
as, single file, the memories follow
the lights of the Ferris wheel
into this granite place in my heart.
•
And there in that cold place,
your delicate wonder manifests
immensities,
things lost: friends, brothers,
direction, dignity - whole jet planes
disappearing into greedy, indifferent oceans.
Fear.
Also laughter, and searching.
Rounding corners, arms outstretched
to granite places in other hearts.
Throwing hallelujahs into the air.
Remembering Satie’s mournful piano
during a long cab ride to the basement
in San Francisco, toward Justin’s death,
our dear friend, that beautiful boy.
•
I lost myself, little bat, in your flight.
It’s unsettling to realize that there are
wild parts of this world
where I can still get irretrievably lost.
You do not search through motion what you’ve lost in space* as I do.
•
This Earth,
it is such a big, blinding place
full of things I can’t ever know,
and I am such a small, bewildered
creature.
•
*reference to Anne Sexton’s poem Sylvia’s Death written in 1963 shortly after Sylvia Plath’s suicide in February of that year
*adapted from Tennessee Williams’s 1944 play The Glass Menagerie
About the Creator
Guia Nocon
Poet writing praise songs from the tender wreckage. Fiction writer working on The Kalibayan Project and curator of The Halazia Chronicles. I write to unravel what haunts us, heals us, and stalks us between the lines.
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Passage. Runner-Up in Poetry of the Hunt Challenge.
Now, to search out the isolates. Gathering the bits. As Duncan said, a sense of parts fitting in relation to a design that is larger*. Neither reduction nor expansion, merely an observation. Comprehending what is happening, every happening. The cogs and wheels necessary to make a life turn, come nearer to its completion. To realize the attempt as an escapist. Working in words...want[ing] every part of the actual world involved in [the] escape*.
By Guia Nocon3 months ago in Poets
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