All Laments Are Circles by Catherine Bresner
Jason Teal on today's bonus poem: We all have ghosts. Ghosts of memory and circumstance stuck on infinite repeat inside our cerebellums. We're subject to their insistent lingering, the minute damages they visit on future exchanges—with colleagues, friends, family, &c. Revising itself with anaphora and expert repetition that rivals its best practitioners, "All Laments Are Circles" maps the trajectory of mourning and offers a sharp critique of the inescapable human condition.
All Laments are Circles
you arrive at my door
you arrive at my door in a suit
you arrive at my door in a suit holding flowers
in your right hand
pink orange carnations
that you thrust in my face like a pompom
like a one-armed cheerleader, cheering me on
***
in your sleeves whole gardens
of chicanery [you arrive at my door]
what kind of man [wearing a suit]
are you/could you/can you
be? [holding flowers] for me? are they?
***
[you arrive] all I can see
are these flowers in my face
full of carnations gardenias in various ghosts of white
you are a particular ghost at my doorstep and somewhere in front of me your voice
is an interruption, your face is nowhere your face/your voice/your face/your voice
***
you arrive at my door holding a gardenia dead crow:
it’s hurt you say
no, it’s dead I say
can you fix it? you say
no, it’s dead I say
do you want it? you say
***
here, give it here I say
***
here in my hand a crow all wet with rain
black /slick /quiet dead now in my hands
***
hands being the mistake hands being the
plural hands becoming unhinged at the wrist, taking flight
across a night filled with moon
flinging birdlike shadows all over the gorgeous grass
***
hands holding
hands handing over the empty vase [while outside
the crow’s caw
or the daisy’s slow decay]
***
today being just an anagram of another day
Catherine Bresner’s poetry has appeared inThe Pinch,H_NGM_N, BOAAT, Cream City Review, Burntdistrict,Handsome, andYemessee, She also has work forthcoming inInkBrick. She is the coordinating editor forThe Seattle Review, the production editor for boaat Press and an intern at Wave Books.
