Monica Ferrell

Monica Ferrell was born in 1975 in New Delhi, India, and grew up in northern New Jersey. She attended Harvard University, Columbia University’s MFA program, and Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Ferrell’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Fence, New England Review, The New York Review of Books, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is the author of a novel, The Grace Notes (Dial Press, 2006). The recipient of a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a Van Lier Fellowship from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and many other fellowships and grants, Ferrell has taught at California College of the Arts and Rutgers University, and is now an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at SUNY-Purchase. She lives in Brooklyn.

Myths of the Disappearance

I rise like a red balloon, untethered and vacant.

The essence of my dolor has become rarefied,

Holy; like a fragrance, bodiless, without referent.

It is a pale shadow on the sun, a wasp’s wing, accidental

Splash of poison on the white rose’s thorn—

I twist it in my fingers and faint. Shall I tell you?

There was one bad fairy at my birth, there came one curse,

One blister, one drop of mercury in the moult of me

And everything was ruined after.

Still it is

No good; the words drift from me like ashes.

I am so old now, I have left half my life

In caves hollowed out in rock by the seashore:

I prayed in each one, and could not find my way back,

Or lied when the password was asked, or turned my back,

Making gestures of despondency at the roiling surf.

In a mirror I shot all my hateful selves, the yesterdays.

Geburt des Monicakinds

I woke. A tiny knot of skin on a silver table

Set in the birth-theater, blinking in the glare

Of electric lights and a strange arranged

Passel of faces: huge as gods in their council.

I was the actor who forgets his lines and enters

On stage suddenly wanting to say, I am.

I was almost all eye: they weighed me down,

Two lump-big brown-sugar bags in a face

Which did not yet know struggle, burden;

How the look of newborns unnerves. Then

They wrapped me in pale yellow like a new sun

Still too small to throw up into the sky.

It was midnight when they injected me

With a plague; tamed, faded as imperialism, pox

Had once put its palm-leaf hand over a quarter of Earth

Saying, these. Now it was contracted to a drop:

And in the morning I knew both death and life.

Lapped in my nimbus of old gold light, my

Huge lashes drooped over my deepened eyes, like

Ostrich-feather shades over twin crown princes: wet heads

Sleek and doomed as the black soul of an open poppy.

Stories from the Tower

I.  Dolorous Garde

Nights in the castle we dream of hounds

we once ran, all those unused names.

Another word departing the room.

Our hands becoming abstract.

Blurred memory of purpose recedes,

recedes again, something outside the frame,

beyond where the tapestry unravels.

Mouth of the drawbridge filling with leaves.

When we came we passed the Hanged Men:

how do you forget such branches?

Such birds. Kay says he remembers fruit

but I don’t believe him. I don’t remember

graves. I had my lady’s favour

but I burnt it at the grate. They will not keep that.

II. Women Singing

Echoes of iron die away, dissolve

into that other darkness. This metal ring

we once called shield is less than useless

now, it is the emblem of what once was

bearing my former name on its brow.

All that has faded to the place of sound,

white field outside my vision. Whenever

I turn around it is not there, a dog’s tail,

wordless shadow snuffing out speech.

Days burnished, colored with the curse of rust,

and nights of shooting silver, we wake to see

a ghost slipping out of the room. And want to follow it.

Down below the women are gutting fish, singing.

Picture the red entrails, what fate tangled itself there.

III. Sleeping Beauty

Now I have been asleep a long time.

I am grown opal, unbreakable: a white blade

stretched along the bed. Out my tower window

all the animals are arranged

like frozen jewels in the snow: the horses

dozing, their lumps of maple sugar

spitted with cold. And the birds, nodding

on the line, full of fairy slumber. In life

they will not know such peace again,

such absolute rest. They are swallowed whole:

feathers tucked in stillness, hearts like a coal

become unburnable in this world.

I am suspended

in my error’s ether: what business did I have

trying to spin my own thread?

This is what is meant by fate.

IV. Sleeping Beauty

At night: the snow. Always this unvarying

deepening. No sound, no wind, no life:

I am not yet dead. Nor sleeping.

Ask for a sign you will not get one.

Ask for time the bottom drops out

and steadily unravels, an uncontrollable

white thread unspinning the winding-sheet.

In my cedar chest the folded gowns

turn over and sigh to each other,

lost in dreams of breezes belonging to spring evenings.

Once I could move where now it is all mind,

all solitude. Nights like this it seems impossible he could make

a difference. Even the steps have surrendered to be stone:

There is a kind of vacancy too immense to ever melt.

V. Prisoner of the Golden Cage

Now, in this blue room, we will give ourself

up, let the long siege go, like a fist

opening to find the crushed bug flown.

Come cousin, it is the hour of surrender:

let us not say it is not so. Snow

is falling on the mosque, is falling

on the gold dome. I remember

lessons we received at the hands of the Master

who pinned butterflies to the enormous page

and turned it. Once there was something here,

but that was a long time ago, another world.

Please don’t be angry: the sea is singing

me to sleep, the water pouring its green

poison into my ear: earth ends, earth ends.