Jennifer Grotz

Jennifer Grotz was born in 1971 in Canyon, Texas, and grew up in various small Texas towns. She holds a BA from Tulane University, an MA and MFA from Indiana University, and a PhD from the University of Houston. Her poems and translations have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere, and have been recognized with a James Michener Fellowship and the Texas Institute of Letters’ Natalie Ornish Prize. Grotz has served as a Poetry Editor for BORN, Gulf Coast, and Indiana Review. She is the author of the letterpress chapbook Not Body (Urban Editions, 2002) and the full-length collection Cusp (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), winner of the Katherine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Prize. She lives in Houston, Texas, where she coordinates the biennial Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, and serves as the assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

The Last Living Castrato

Difficult to believe, a knife ensures the voice,

soprano notes proceed intact while chest hair and beard

accompany the new lower octaves, the voice expanding

beyond sex, limited only by lung. And now whole

operas composed for castrati are abstract and

unperformable, now whole species of off-humans who

were sacrificed for air, for air sinking and rising

in their throats, are extinct, now facsimiles

reproduce for our ears what is digital mastery,

bleeding soprano and countertenor. Except for

the brief miracle of Edison’s recording:

the last living castrato’s voice brimming through

static and hiss. Technology at its beginning and

old-school opera at its decline, that cusp

between where a voice spanning five octaves sang

to give us proof of the voice, and of how

we doctored it to make it more whole, to widen

emotion’s aperture. He held it

in his mouth. Audiences would beg for

the aria to be sung over and over,

interrupting the story, which was only

an excuse for the voice. The voice is how,

rising, rising, so as to dive,

and he held it in his mouth releasing

our cruel sacrifice, our gratitude

to hear it fall, driven to where

the voice takes us: silence, applause.

Not Body

When silence is a small quick word

that keeps being said. When lips

open to tongue. Silence punctuates

a spitting, a glowing wick,

wax warping to drape you

like a hood. You grow wild,

become a stubbornness.

Something like a whisper keeps coming forward.

Such a busy flame, leveling everything

to a hardened pool.

I’ll keep the vigil.

Let a little light come tell me what.

Let a flicker make me brave.

I’ve always insisted on you. If I could

be sure. If the night were safe, not slippery

like a flame. If the body were more than a clock.

If the body could be seen through like a window.

If the body lives to be burned.

Then you: unpredictable and loyal. Then you:

snuffed out, or replaced

with the sweet valedictions of smoke.

The Wolf

It was dawn when the wolf turned away from me,

his paw in a steel trap. Though I admire wakers

swimming up to the surface toward sky—the clear,

dry ocean of the mind—I sank back.

His paw bloodied in unretractable teeth,

I was able only to loosen the trap from its chain.

He circled the tree with clatter and limping.

When he fell, exhausted, the trap’s jaw opened.

The pack of wolves approached swiftly then,

their silence devastating amid the scuffing leaves.

I knew what would happen, I heard each heavy pant

as the wolves lined up. The sleep was torn, reentered…

When he comes back like an animal, when he runs like one

able to hear far-off cries, then he is most lost to me.

Kiss of Judas

It’s not greed I feel in me, the silver in my pocket

slapping my thigh like knives (I know I am about to die)

but the knowledge my kiss will betray you, betray me (I welcome

this kiss, I want it on my lips, I want to hear its click)

when I cup your chin in my hand, when I stare in your eyes

(I am frightened by my Father, by my Judas, who comes

sheepishly toward me through the crowd of soldiers)

I am unsure it could be more full than this moment,

I am so fearful of heaven, the grand cacophony of spears

jabbing skyward around us, torches blazing light in your face,

a redundancy (I love his dark skin and how his robe swings

heavy, how he has caught me) They were dirty men to deal with,

they hate you, they are jealous (why am I only love?)

Find me your truest of all, I could be years

but not eternity (please come kiss me) I am drawn toward

a destruction (I want to be generous), and if I cry

I know you forgave me before they counted coins

into my palm (give myself to this inevitable,

to someone oblivious in his unasking), before Peter losing

his temper (I will replace the ear) Loss is

what is irreplaceable (rise to this moment and say,

I let you go and be and may you be pleased) So obvious in words

(not control of him, not word of him, not hope of him, but

permission) I will kiss the savior (every muscle relaxed now)

but I am not the one who matters (I am to be erased,

so that I might exist somewhere else, present but)

you will push me (like music, no traces of it afterward)

gently away, seal us apart (I chose him knowing his love

would be painful, would make my heart heavy and anxious

for this to pass) and I am not sure how much

longer I will linger (Both of us shall be wretched)