Elizabeth Scanlon
I never said I was deep
Good architecture gives the longing for perfect order
a focus and like Lear who (in our collective imagination)
said reason not the need I gather flowers often
on the way home from work when I meant
to get dinner. Not that Lear ran errands, rather
that he wandered from his duty.
When I walk by the house on Waverly Street
that I know from Zillow is filled with glowing wood,
waxed by hand, bought by some pharma bro,
I wish the worst on homeowners.
not a bird person
Being dense of bone & seeing seagulls as nothing
but venal & yet this tiny grey one,
demonstrating the limits of the physical,
crossed my path. Or I its.
It would be rude to pretend we don’t see it.
I wouldn’t know what it’s called, dun-colored
with a little yellow under the chin,
like the glow from buttercups little girls hold
up to your face & say oh you like butter because the light
would reflect the color back, blue on the shoulder
if a bird can be said to have shoulders, I don’t even know that,
what the topmost rounded part of the wing is called,
tiny eyes closed, perfect feet curled, all exactly intact & ended
by a too-clean pane of glass.
CElizabeth Scanlon reads “not a bird person”
See You
The glass is clean the veil is thin and in my strangeness is my purpose,
reaching through the window with alien not-arms to the stone dogs that guard
the park then beyond them, tentacling the way from one tree to the next
I swing as a thought-thing intent on going away from the workplace. When I see you
again it will have been a very long time, the long roots of my hair will be white
because at some point, I will give up and become. You will be blind
because it has been forty-two years since you’ve had reason to part
the curtains. Sit by the window in the full glare of the sun.
The glow-orange afterspots on your eyelids are my love,
irradiated and aimless.
Rewatching
You think you’ve seen it before but you’re not sure,
it has been 20 years.
Donnie Darko starts with a bike ride
swooping down toward the anesthetized parents
and the Samanthas and Elizabeths of 2001,
which was supposed to be 1988,
which wasn’t great either
Everything familiar and ironic –
I would like to be changed by your love,
but so far I feel the same
as when I was a hungry teenager
and that is my fault, I’m sure,
as I was told it was then and this
is my most petulant attitude,
how dare I want anything –
Donnie Darko doesn’t want to die alone.
I don’t remember the first cigarette, it was
as if I came out of the womb smoking,
though I do recall the last one I had before learning
I was pregnant. Its sudden lastness.
What became of all the places I lived
but never took pictures of? I won’t know.
But why would I want to? There is
reason in vanishing.
On the way
to the shore, a sign by the road said
undercoating, like for your boat or car
if you go in for that kind of a thing,
but before looking again as I slowed my roll
I’d already imagined a store
devoted to un-decorating,
piles of beaded, spangled crap
in each corner, leaving its tall walls
blank & the roof blown off.
Elizabeth Scanlon reads “Rewatching”
Elizabeth Scanlon is the author of Whosoever Whole (forthcoming, Omnidawn) and Lonesome Gnosis (Horsethief Books). She is the Editor-in-Chief of The American Poetry Review.