From “Like Honey”
3: Blue Spruces Heave
my muse says that contrary predicates imply each other:
person as originator person as originated / the match burned my fingers /
more like this hot witch I know at Lottie’s last night
bumping into the Moon & buying her a drink asking her sign /
looking good baby like catching an echo with a
flashlight down the flaring chestnut median /
like rinsing the clouds from the sky Lord
October learning the maple’s menstrual rhythms I am not worthy
with no things but in ideas / barefoot that you should enter
enough for a life of small good loves under my roof
like I eat cold chicken in the dark but only
like finding an unseasonable weed in my ear say the word
through a bunchy bouquet megaphone & my soul
like salvaged thunder shall be
drinking me in like intercourse healed
but more like counting the rays of sun my flesh blocks /
counting how many eras a single limb of Andrea’s wisteria splits /
Venus only ever rises in the west right? / it’s not always in me
to recognize as holy those who shade the meanings who doubt
who invite certain subtleties in / everlastingly current / for instance:
it turns out those stunned & thirsty ghosts among the mown lawn
are not truly dead rather G. explains they’re how we frail living relate
to certain of our human sorrows / don’t love astrology /
there’s nothing in us any matrix of stone & sweet fire would stir
toward job success or fortuitous sex / the constellations are like
Christ: a pattern of cold space & collapsing flame that flies
thoughtlessly apart the moment we turn our heads
the moment we change worlds / time is changeless:
stuff streams by out eyes’ windows & things fall
away & we call time change /
but it’s only stuff changing: stuff in time / time itself
lordly & singular stirs for nobody no hour starves itself
for my infected desire / I use only plant names I’m sure of—
Andrea’s wisteria was no late-season lilac— but I really don’t
know most names / on a walk it’s mostly a seething
nearness of detail & green rather than memory /
explaining
the rising smell of crushed fir needles like a burning boat
explaining
Mary to her poor banished children
explaining
fire at the lash’s fringe
explaining
insomnia & her children
explaining
the blue crescent warming the kettle
explaining
the cloud’s drowse into 3 o’clock twilight
explaining
anguish tamped down
explaining
the loose thread of waking body trailing behind through some numb
underground hum I feel a love poem starting through my fault
through my fault through my most grievous rumor
of flesh & blue bone don’t you bless me? / through my old-fashioned words
& muscles & my damaged unspeakable manners? / I love the rough
alive at-home-ness of your skin its scars & lacks its moles & minute motions /
one day I hope to know fully as I am fully known / the moon
mattering to the battered plum / some bare tight-barked
deciduous thing latticing the blue sky lightens later
leafmolds in the park’s bestial byways / the cotton you run your warm
legs through crackles & you flower unseasonably out in-
to my mouth / noise of walnut hulls windblown
up the street / lips wine-stained / ever notice how your night ends
but the map that carries you through your night remains
straining mind & will toward retrieval? /
Jay Aquinas Thompson is a poet, essayist, and critic with recent or forthcoming work in COAST | NoCOAST, Full Stop, Fog Machine, Sprung Formal, Denver Quarterly, The Stockholm Review of Literature, Berfrois, The Conversant, Kenyon Review Online, and Poetry Northwest, where he’s a contributing editor. He lives with his family in Seattle, where he teaches creative writing to incarcerated women.
