Thomas Heise
Thomas Heise was born in 1971 in northern Michigan. He grew up in southern Florida, and went on to receive a BA from Florida State University, an MA in Creative Writing from the University of California at Davis, and a PhD in American Literature from New York University. His poetry and essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, Verse, and other journals. In 2004, he received the Gulf Coast Prize for Poetry. His first book of poems is Horror Vacui (Sarabande, 2006). A former curator of the Reading Between A and B Series in New York’s East Village, Heise is now a member of the English Faculty at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and is working on a second book of poems while completing a critical volume on 20th-century urban American literature and culture.
Corrections
We were mistaken. The Queen never
loved a horse. The whole mystery
will surface when we recover
the missing notebook from
the wreckage. “In summer, she’d
wander the lawn in her white robe,
the light in her hair” is a misquote.
Apologize. Fill in the blank
with your trumpet. On page nine all
the names are untrue. We were
mistaken. The man running from
the crime scene remains unidentified.
My whereabouts: unknown. I am
lost in Newfoundland. We were
mistaken. Erasure on your heart’s
fifth amendment should read: No
one slept here. Memorialize it—
dream it permanent. Even
the sparrow you lifted dead
from the basket was an error.
My Pietà
He held me bone-tight. He held me backward.
He held me high with the bellows
to smoke the beehive, hanging delicate
as a lung in the branches and bleeding
a half-gallon of honey while he held me. He held me
in the bathtub, scrubbed ashes from my small tongue.
He held me in the pond of his hand,
as if I were a tadpole, and wouldn’t let go.
He held me hostage. I would hide
in the dumpster. Under the rain bucket
during thunderstorms. Holding my breath
among the lawn statues of gnomes and giant toadstools
until he found me, held me, walked me home.
When I fell asleep in the attic, he would carry me down
and sing to me. One winter he held a rope, lowered me
by the ankles to the well’s bottom.
I ascended upside-down through the dark thermometer
with a blood orange in my teeth. He had a beard
of new snow. I held cold to his pant leg
while our dog leapt and snapped at a sound
in the air only he could hear. When I fell
in love, he reached out to me and held me down
when she slinked away on our dirt road alone,
sheepish, depressed. He held me as the constellations
mingled through the torn curtain.
A beanstalk sprouted through a hole
in our above-ground pool. A band of raccoons
commandeered the upstairs and stared
at us as he held me in his reading chair.
He grew older, he held my ear
to his artificial heart on a daily basis.
He grew sick, he held me like a suckling child.
We grew smaller and smaller and would crawl
after each other through tall grass growing through our carpet.
The walls of the house fell away.
We curled in a bird’s nest. I could barely hold
his tiny thumb in my fingers.
We felt a shell growing around us.
The dog was barking.
And then rain, we could hear it tapping,
we held each other, then a blast
of hot light roared through.
Zombie
In your three-piece suit and your tuxedo shoes
you’re dressed as if to go, but in your coma
you do not come or go. The wife you left
has come down from the mountain to give
you a matching ring of glass. Your doll-sized
daughter has brought you a kelp flower
that smells of salt to pin to your lapel.
Into your welmish eye, she says,
the world is drearful and you should go now.
But nothing rouses you from the deepwater sleep
in which you melt like an iceberg. On a canopied bier
fit for a sun king, you float and dream of what?
Your kaleidoscope? An octopus? The suitcase,
packed with a warm coat and dried apricots
for your soft teeth, waits at the door.
On the far shore your mother waves for you.
Her little white flag is a seagull’s wing.
There you do not go to her. The bridge stops
in midair, the perch of the swan diver.
The canoe decays into a trough of rosemary,
so I’ll bury it with roses: He loves me, he loves
me not, he loves me, he loves me not he loves
me not. Can you hear me? My ear to your ear
and my dumb voice boomerangs. Your brain
a beehive, its combs dormant from the first
snowfall are full of rings and echoes.
On the floor the cat crouches, lapping
your spilled coins: clink clink clink.
The gargoyle climbs down from his gable
to sit in your rubber plant. He sings a lullaby.
Your paper lips sip an air tube, passive
as a bored child. Your daughter has just
pulled off your caterpillar mustache.
Your wife has turned into a sunspot.
Today I have a small blue heart made of velvet.
I listen for the chanticleer to declare
all-clear for you to go. He has gone,
flown kamikaze into yesterday’s sun.
Now my kingdom of dirt will not fill
the flowered urn where I will store
and sift your ruins bitter for a golden hair.
Now my arm is growing into an orange branch
as I speak. The moon has risen full
behind my leafy eyes. I want to sleep, but
the owl who is eating my tongue says no.