Katie Ford
Katie Ford was born in 1975 in Colorado, and grew up in Oregon. She holds degrees from Whitman College, Harvard University, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, and Seneca Review. Her first book is Deposition (Graywolf, 2002). Ford is an Assistant Professor of English at Loyola University in New Orleans, and also regularly teaches for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. She is the poetry editor of the New Orleans Review, lives in the Faubourg Marigny district of New Orleans with her husband, the novelist Josh Emmons, and is at work on her second book.
Flesh
One breath began the world, one can take it back again.
(Ask if I remember when.)
I would have preferred the void. At least there you know there is nothing to find.
Now the sun lowers behind the river, bare
sycamores fill with sundown. Long bones
like iron branching in the stained glass
of the incarnation. There is only so long I can watch
things do down.
(Also ask what happened to my body.)
Some leaves only show after the sun is fully down, the light violet
and blue, a second river, one with no drawbridge to lean over and look.
The brown geese walk on the frozen river, shuddering to dry
their simple bodies.
(Also about my body.)
In the winter the last leaves fall, or remain
clipped to the branch, lobes opening
from the base of each swollen leafstalk. No seed
this time of year, tight and inscripted within,
to tell it what it is.
(Ask me what I believe.)
(What was said about disobedience.)
When I speak I hear a rustling of leaves, of wings and ashes, of someone
straightening something undone. A sweeping up of the left
ungathered, and the bridge is lifted by its inner chains.
If you are speaking I cannot hear you.
Nocturne
I can see the whole city, lights edging the harbor like yellow pins in uneven
cloth beneath the hands of a woman cutting the measured lines of a dress;
when it is done she will put it on to see if it fits.
Blackish harbor, facing east no facing west, lights
meaning anything but exit, ships waiting for dawn so they can navigate out,
fog in the cove, cigarette smoke in this
restaurant at the top of the Prudential.
Please do not use your hands to touch my face.
Please let me be decided.
Lights fringe the harbor, she is sewing a dress a centimeter too small,
you tap off ashes, I lean into the winding smoke because it is not myth,
because I can bring even an ending into the body.
The city now unsettled beneath us. My face eye-level in the glass.
Please help me get up from this table.
Please put that thing down.
She turns an edge under. Smoke is taken in, smoke like a text
etched into two tablets of lung. Here, and here: Sinai.
Atoms fill their due portion of each ash.
Please look somewhere else with your eyes.
She undoes the knotted threads where she wants the blue and gray strips closer
to each other, crop of lavender, dust.
Please do not touch my face.
When she is done she takes off her clothes, raises her arms to get into the dress,
Please do not touch my face.
The harbor at its darkest, stillest, like a question in a throat.
The Hands of the Body Without the Body, and Nothing to Hold
How she worked was this: Give me what I need, I am bending down,
this is the last thing I’ll ask—a fossilized backbone, a clay vase, a cylinder of darker
ground where oil seeped out of a jar. Something—the hollow of her lung?—
with whispering inside it, bring me something, bring me something. An ax in her
hand digging into the hillside, poison oak everywhere. Her body everywhere
covered with rash. In her sack of air the whispering warped and tripled
by a thin border: This is the site. This is the thing. Let, to those who have, more
be given.
It’s that she wants something solved, ended, even darkly, a crow stopped by glass.
The gash tearing further, tissue exposed. Rocks grind under
the wheel of a truck coming uphill. Even an umbilical cord of exhaust
cannot pull her into the unsought present.
Polluted metaphysic, bolt where the engine gives out.
Night begins, untrustworthy for what it does to the eye, the pupil blown open,
the iris branching its genealogy. Dust climbs,
her skin the color of the hill, hives beneath, red poppies in smog.
She thinks, the rip in the fabric would prove—the linen preserved would show—
the buried
text would give—(and so on). Blackbirds huddle beneath the parked truck
(Bring me
something.), each wing a jag of obsidian sheeting off its rock (Anything.).
The broken-up hill bears its spine, its dream of ladders—
(The self wants to find the self elsewhere.). She bears down on its rounded bone.
Why do you seek the living among the dead? She bears down. What do you seek?
She bears down. Why are you afraid?
My hand is torn open, I have nothing to show. Why are you afraid? I am
afraid I might find the entire stone church beneath this hill. Altar, crypt, bodies
curled like leaves in ash. I am scared I will find it all and still it will not move me.
Colosseum
I stared at the ruin, the powder of the dead
now beneath ground, a crowd
assembled and breathing with
indiscernible sadnesses, light
from other light, far off
and without explanation. Somewhere unseen
the ocean deepened then and now
into more ocean, the black fins
of the bony fish obscuring
its bottommost floor, carcasses of mollusks
settling, casting one last blur of sand,
unable to close again. Next to me a woman,
the seventeen pins it took to set
her limb, to keep every part flush with blood.
*
In the book on the ancient mayfly
which lives only four hundred minutes
and is, for this reason, called ephemeral,
I couldn’t understand why the veins laid across
the transparent sheets of wings, impossibly
fragile, weren’t blown through in their half-day
of flight. Or how that design has carried the species
through antiquity with collapsing
horses, hailstorms and diffracted confusions of light.
*
If I remember correctly what’s missing
broke off all at once, not into streets
but into rows portioned off for shade as it
fell here, the sun there
where the poled awning ended. Didn’t the heat
and dust funnel down
to the condemned as they fought
until the animal took them completely? Didn’t at least one stand
perfectly still?
*
I said to myself: Beyond my husband there are strange trees
growing on one of the seven hills.
They look like intricately tended bonsais, but
enormous and with unreachable hollows.
He takes photographs for our black folios,
thin India paper separating one from another.
There is no scientific evidence of consciousness
lasting outside the body. I think when I die
it will be completely.
*
But it didn’t break off all at once.
It turns out there is a fault line under Rome
that shook the theater walls
slight quake by quake. When the empire fell,
the arena was left untended
and exotic plants spread a massive overgrowth,
their seeds brought from Asia and Africa, sown accidentally
in the waste of the beasts.
Like our emptying, then aching questions,
the vessel filled with unrecognizable faunas.
*
How great is the darkness in which we grope,
William James said, not speaking of the earth, but the mind
split into its caves and plinth from which to watch
its one great fight.
And then, when it is over,
when those who populate your life return
to their curtained rooms and lie down without you,
you are alone, you are quarry.
*
When the mayflies emerge it is in great numbers
from lakes where they have lived in nymphal skins
through many molts. At the last
a downy skin is shed and what proofed them
is gone. Above water there is
nothing for them to feed on—
they don’t even look, except for each other.
They form hurried swarms in that starving, sudden hour
and mate fully. When it is finished it is said
the expiring flies gather beneath boatlights
or lampposts and die under them minutely,
drifting down in a flock called snowfall.
*
Nothing wants to break, but this wanted to break,
built for slaughter, open arches to climb through,
lines of glassless squares above, elaborate
pulleys raising the animals on platforms
out of the passaged darkness.
When one is the site of so much pain, one must pray
to be abandoned. When abandonment is that much more—
beauty and terror before every witness
and suddenly you are not there.