Joyelle McSweeney
Joyelle McSweeney was born in 1976 in Boston. She attended Harvard University, Oxford University, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Crowd, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Gulf Coast, Poetry, and elsewhere. McSweeney’s two books of poems are The Red Bird (Fence, 2002) and The Commandrine and Other Poems (Fence, 2004). The cofounder of Action Books and a staff critic for The Constant Critic, she lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Alabama.
Still Life w/Influences
I stood at the modern knothole,
my eyes on the pivoting modern stars and naphthalene green
turfs and surfaces.
Behind me the stone fleur-de-lis
sank back over the horizon,
carving a fleur-de-lis-shaped track in air
that spread into a bigger hole.
Up on the hill,
a white tent had just got unsteadily to its feet
like a foal or a just-foaled cathedral.
Down on the beach, ten black whales were crashing
slowly, through themselves,
draped in wet bedsheets.
The bedsheets smoked into the air.
I opened my palm. A green edifice opened there.
It seemed to breathe but that was air breathing for it,
lifting a corner or a column.
Goodbye, my thirteenth century.
I folded the money away.
What do ye do when ye see a whale?
I sing out.
The Wind Domes
Everyone knows that time unfolds
as events into the particular. His shredded shirt
floats down as cloud ripples. These are his motion-
and his power-lines
receding through the valley.
His shoulders one shade greener than the sky.
The valley two shades greener.
go back after—songs waft from the box
encouraging us to go through with it.
To be a worthy continuum.
To be a moral compendium
in the dark green chickpea glade—
I’m a kid so I can’t go anywhere.
You’ll have to bring it to me.
—in the frosted flakes of grain
in the rushes where, if you pull one up,
they scream or interrogate you.
Emptied of their po-et-ree
they lie in the potters’ field.
The vessels, I mean. The protest of the dog
in the throat of the evening
makes the evening suddenly deep.
The Problem of Knowledge is
what to do with it,
once you have it.
(Sign this form.)
(Paste a picture of your skiff, here)
gamboling debt
on the rambling see.
The little deck shifting
like a slopéd glen (Paste
your thumb to it. Thumbprint, you clod!)
a-clearing. The buck’s rack glinting in retreat.
I lift it like a flashcard and it gathers no ______________ .
Lift it like a fish from life.
and how am I to convince you, if you aren’t here to convince?
Those people just aren’t here anymore.
They split. They left the club. I told you
(I woulda told you) like a bathmat or a bathroom’s drudge
-light to make do with. To make
right by. There is no second life.
Plutonium wristlet appears as a circle of fireflies
as she crosses the humpéd lawn.
The closer they get,
you can see the holes between them.
Slipped from her wrist, plunged to toss in the bed
that ran from the summer capitol.
The river, I mean. Sunk down
to surface again
in the cluster. Magnified.
How it gave off a summery light.
Persuasion
Others were more economical than I. But I
had my red marble. I had action
figures weighting down the drapes
on tiny threads. That twisted and got smaller.
One door led
to a more economical room.
Perhaps a more economical view. The girl
across the hall was the same girl.
I climbed out across the telephone wires. I thought
they’d hold me, like the webbing of a lawn chair,
and like a wedding or a lawnchair they didn’t. I kept
pulling chunks out of the hummock. I fell with my
fists full of humus. Into, of course.
At home the state-painter was painting the ghost oak. And
the window around the oak. The room around
you-know-who.
She came from the same
town in Iceland.
Whither and whence I
came. O-ho!
With her eye
she came and came.
With her weather
eye she came.
I saw the damage this was doing to the van
would not cost six hundred dollars.
I pedaled off in my car.
My car got smaller.
It wouldn’t fit my littlest brother!
It fell over.
Fell, of course, into.
Back at the ranch, it was a tenement.
I was a tenant of the studio-apartment.
I was building a house in French.
Expectorant—I was self-enlightened,
my efforts self-directed and sustained.
To the tune of eighty-seven dollars
I debated a suitable depth. A squirrel
at each level of the fence
with an apple for a face looked on blandly.
I mean red. Red-faced. Blindly.
Heavenly stage set comes
in on wheels and wheels around.
The fish wind up the concrete ladder
because they believe it’s better
to reach a higher part of the rive
to pour themselves out
while I pour myself into
the form that has survived
My father leaves tomorrow
and he leaves this
afternoon. This is before
I set fire to my room,
pouring water into the electric baseboards
trying to wash a tiny brine shrimp
off the wall. It might have lived.
This is after my mother,
her father dead. Lay in bed.
Heard the Skylark song.