Paisley Rekdal

Paisley Rekdal was born in 1970 in Seattle, Washington. She studied as an undergraduate at the University of Washington and Trinity College in Dublin, completed an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto, and received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (Pantheon, 2000; Vintage, 2002), and two books of poetry—A Crash of Rhinos (University of Georgia Press, 2000) and Six Girls Without Pants (Eastern Washington University Press, 2002). Her work has been recognized with a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, a Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea, an NEA Fellowship, a Wyoming Council for the Arts Fellowship, and the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review. She lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, and teaches in the University of Utah’s Creative Writing Program.

Strawberry

I am going to fail.

I’m going to fail cartilage and plastic, camera and arrow.

I’m going to fail binoculars and conjugations,

all the accompanying musics: I am failing,

I must fail, I can fail, I have failed

the way some women throw themselves

into lover’s arms or out trains,

fingers crossed and skirts billowing

behind them. I’m going to fail

the way strawberry plants fail,

have dug down hard to fail, shooting

brown runners out into silt, into dry gray beds,

into tissue and rock. I’m going to fail

the way their several hundred hearts below surface

have failed, thick, soft stumps desiccating

to tumors; the way roots wizen in the cold

and cloud black, knotty as spark plugs, cystic

synapses. I’m going to fail light and stars and tears.

I’m going to fail the way cowards only wish they could fail,

the way the brave refuse to fail or the vain fear to,

believing that to stray even once from perfection

is to be permanently cast out, Wandering Jew

of failure, Adam of failure, Sita of failure; that’s the way

I’m going to fail, bud and creosote and cloud.

I’m failing pet and parent. I’m failing the food

in strangers’ stomachs, the slender inchoate rings

of distant planets. I’m going to fail these words

and the next and the next. I’m going to fail them,

I’m going to fail her—trust me, I’ve already failed him—

and the possibility of a we is going to sink me

like a bad boat. I’m going to fail the way

this strawberry plant has failed, alive without bud,

without fruit, without tenderness, hugging itself

to privation and ridiculous want.

I’m going to fail simply by standing in front of you,

waving my arms in your face as if hailing a taxi:

I’m here, I’m here, please don’t forget me,

though you already have, I smell it, even cloaked

with soil, sending out my slender fingers for you,

sending out all my hair and tongue and brain.

I’m going to fail you

just as you’re going to fail me,

urging yourself further down to sediment

and the tiny, trickling filaments of damp;

thirsty, thirsty, desperate to drown

if even for a little while, if even for once:

to succumb, to be destroyed,

to die completely, to fail the way I’ve failed

in every particular sense of myself,

in every new and beautiful light.

Stupid

In Detroit, a 41-year-old gets stuck and drowns in two feet of water after squeezing his head through a narrow sewer grate to retrieve his car keys.

A joke? Tell me

the story of Job, that book of the pious man

who suffered because the devil wanted to teach God

faith kills through illusion. Sub

+ ferrere = to carry, to wear boils

like a string of pearls around the neck

and watch son, wealth, house turn

into a sootfall of ash. Suffer

the little children I thought was an imperative

not to love but to disdain.

Tell me the one about Santiago Alvarado

who died in Lompoc, having fallen

through the ceiling of the shop

he burgled when the flashlight he carried in his mouth

rammed into his skull.

How Nick Berrena was stabbed to death

by a friend trying to prove a knife couldn’t penetrate

the flak vest Berrena wore,

or Daniel Jones dug an eight-foot hole in the sand

whose broad shelf buried him alive.

Hast not thou made a hedge

about him, and about all he hath on every side?

Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath

he will give for his life.

Tell me what the foolish

should make with their small faith

in roofing, keys just a fingerhold away. This world,

shimmering with strange death in which we know

that to trip on the staircase, wreck the lover’s car

is perhaps also to sit covered with ash eating

one’s own white heart.

Why doesn’t the universe turn a lovelier face to me?

A woman runs to a poison control center

after eating three vaginal inserts while a man

has a cordless phone pulled from his rectum.

I comfort friends

badly, curse the stove for my meal,

live with the wrong man for years.     Faith

for me extends just as far as I’m rewarded; if I laugh

about the mouth foaming with nonoxynol

I’m also awed at the woman’s belief propelling her toward

not away from fear, contrary to skepticism or evidence.

Are there not mockers with me?

and doth not mine eye continue in their provocation?

Bildad begged Job take the smarter path of self-blame:

the sinner must be punished with sin, the stupid destroyed

by stupidity. Shall the earth be forsaken for thee? he asked.

How long will ye mock me? Job cried. God waits

and his words blush furiously up to heaven.

Stupid. Job is stupid for believing.

And I am one of the false mockers chastising

endlessly the faith of one who suffers,

who produces no great thing but shame: to wait

is to destroy the organ and a rash act

must mar this soul. Stupid,

how could you love me when everything I give you hurts?

Satan is an old joke to us who don’t know

how many temptations lurk

in the commonest household:

the knife, the flashlight. But Santiago knows

and if stealing is the thing that brings one closer

to happiness, and keeping one’s hands

free means the difference

between this life and death, that’s one line he’ll cross.

Few people die intelligently,

the mind gone, shit or urine trickling

between sheets: why not be stabbed

believing yourself protected from the physical indignity

of a knife? The Lord,

he destroyeth the perfect and the wicked.

Stupid, listen to me: I’m dying

and everywhere there are azaleas and people speaking French,

so many cups of tea I’ll never drink!

Job, you are stupid for your faith as we are stupid for our lack of it,

snickering at the stockbroker jogging off the cliff, though

shouldn’t we wonder at all a man can endure

to believe, like this one

whose wife said was so in love

with the world how could he look down

while running when he knew

(or should he) all his soul

went up?

What Was There to Bring Me to Delight But to Love and Be Loved?

I declared, and immediately rejected this. For instance:

a man I loved once liked to hurt women and would tell me

what he did to his lovers. The sight of a woman’s slight hips

as she was knocked over a television might give delight. Or the way

bones sounded in skin that bumped or scraped against a wall.

He used to claim he could hear things like this, not

the scratch of a woman’s back on a wall, but actual

bone rubbing muscle, skin, joint, the sound

as if sticks rattled in cloth. It frightened him, he said, he found himself

pushing other women to prove he couldn’t really hear the sound.

And I loved him. I loved forgiving him. I must admit this

though he never laid a hand on me,

I knew enough about this kind of loss.

There were more significant things

to demand from the world. Such as how

a word could call up more than violence, idea, person, become

reality with only the finest limitations

of meaning. Such as monster, perhaps,

or grave, or delicious. I could say, for instance, that this man

was a delicious monster with his strap-colored hair and soft mouth

though where does that place me

in the universe of word? Perhaps you could say I

was the monster, searching not for where rivers ran but to the source

of rivers, the frozen nugget of an idea of river: so cold

it almost burns the rock around it. I was the one willing to sacrifice

so many others of my kind; I could listen for hours

to his stories of women whose bones itched within them

and all I could think was hand, eye, mouth as if to say the words

was to take his fingers into my mouth, to suck

the warm pink nails between my teeth, or lick the egg taste

from his eye with my tongue. These were more real to me

than the fact he would cry out on the phone or in my bedroom

where we would talk. He would cry and all I could think was

More, let my thighs be another casing for you

if this is the kind of grave you want. I almost thought grace. I almost

gave in once but, and this is the truth, he was afraid of me. I

was the coldness of rivers, he said, I was the source

and when he looked down at me lying on the sheets rumpled

like ruined skin, he called me his destroyer.

Perhaps the real question in the world is not

what to love, but how to forgive.

What does it take for the monstrous

to be delightful in the eye of God? As if beauty itself

wasn’t also obscene—a hand really fleshed claw, a peony

a flowering of blood. Or perhaps a word is really all it signifies, all

we can trust in fact; to name a thing

is to make it so. When I called this man a man, you must believe

he became one for me. The source of the river,

not its oceangrasp. What happened to the man I loved

is that eventually he choked a woman almost to death.

We weren’t speaking then. Even I, it seems, have my limits.

But I can imagine how he would have told me he could hear her spine

crying out to him, an accusation of the flesh. What more is there

but to love like this and to be loved? he asked me once.

You are my source of delight,

an eternal search for grace, I answered. I almost said the grave.

A Crash of Rhinos

What’s your pet name? Collective noun?

What will Snookums do today? Your bedmate

pulls quarters magically from behind your ear, one

for each hour you’ve spent together. When he stops

there’s fifty cents sliding into the sheets and his tongue

covering the pink cauliflower of your nipple. “Beautiful

defects,” he whispers into your body. “Ah, Nature.” Roll away,

don’t care when he calls you “Thumper.” By noon you’ll be

nose to nose anyway, a sloth of bears, snoozing

your way into this relationship.

Ah, Nature. You could tell him its startling fact

is not its defects but its sameness. A uniformity

suggestive of some single-cell prototype, our Adam/Eve

genome plucked, as scientists think, from the thread

of a lightning bolt. Darling, today you’re more

than anonymous, one sexy blip among the thousand

couples grunting in each other’s arms; defined by Loving,

your action. Flying geese only recognized

by the form they make in the sky.

A crash of rhinos, piece of asses. Stinkhead:

everything comes in boring droves of hogs.

This is how you got here. Mid-morning he tallies your union

in terms of snakes, tarantulas, the evolutionary needs

of common flagellates till you scorn science: its primal

urge to pair like scared cows shoved ass to ass in circles

for defense. A clutch of penises! What is love but fear?

That soft storm at your periphery, sudden hand

pushing you below surface? Thoughts, as you age or sicken,

sifted from consciousness like dusts of starlings: Love me,

little lamb. No one should die alone.

Sweetheart, all your friends are married.

Packs of teazles? Kerfs of panters? A multiplicity of spouses.

Today only two quarters protect you

from loneliness. It’s out of your hands. The job

didn’t pan, checks bounce, 2 A.M. is its own

worst child. This is your last magic trick.

“Kumquat,” he whispers. Lover. Loved one.

And the soul begs always, Leave me leave me

while the body says simply, Stay.