Tessa Rumsey

Tessa Rumsey was born in 1970 in Stamford, Connecticut, and lived on Harmony Ranch, an artist’s commune, for four years, before moving with her parents to San Francisco, where she was raised in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and also lives today. She holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA from the University of Iowa, and an MA in Visual Criticism from the California College of the Arts. Rumsey’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Conjunctions, The New Republic, Verse, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. Her two books of poems are Assembling the Shepherd (University of Georgia Press, 1999) and The Return Message (W.W. Norton, 2005), winner of the 2004 Barnard Women Poets Prize.

More Important Than the Design of Cities Will Be the Design of Their Decay

Loneliness is a laboratory; its territory is forever defined; for reasons

beyond our conviction

It cannot be lessened; only redirected and made to resemble a crumbling

heaven or the year’s

Grand delusion: I shall no longer want for that which left me long ago—

go slow, said the soul,

That you may know the streets of your abandoned city more intimately

than any joy

Or cherished season. We were in collusion, this city and I, creating

a mythology of desolation;

Feeling utterly evacuated; yet methodically structured; in a post-Roman

Empire; previously

Doomed sort of way—and what did the soul say, but know it better, then

in a fever, go deeper.

There are days, I told the translator, when the veil drops and I am

no longer inside the No-

Place most familiar, built by me long ago, and I walk through the world

as if made real

By the existence of others and the casual way a crowd pauses together

on a concrete curbside—

Perhaps one of them is weeping, perhaps another will gently reach out

and twist a knife

Into my heart and we will lock eyes, and I will fall to my knees, and

for a moment

He will hold me. What will I remember? The cold blade’s cruel

demeanor? My body

As it seizures? Or the gesture of my destroyer, showing me that in this

life, I was not alone.

Man-Torpedo-Boat

If he had loved me he would not have designed

the land mine the land mine

that jumps up from black matted soil

to the level of a heart the land mine

that explodes while floating in the air

like an iron cherub like the blameless conjunction

between man and killing machine

If he had loved me he would not have written

the executioner’s list for Tuesday the list

spotted with jam and breadcrumbs and the hubris

of early morning coffee

tucked away into the trousers of a messenger

holding one end of a rope the rope tied

to the last name on the list

If he had truly loved me he could not have delivered

the letter bomb the letter bomb

wrapped in luminous paper of onion skin bejeweled

by the riddling stamps of Egypt the letter bomb

addressed in the goldblack songlines of Arabic and pushed

through the mailslot like the suggestion of new love

and its necessary language

If he loved me like bread and water like air like thinking

he would have reinvented his speech

like the poet Marinetti in Italy

on the eve

of World War I

searching for a new grammar

to capture the velocity of the machine gun

Every noun should have its double

that is

the noun should be followed

with no conjunction

by the noun

to which it is related

by analogy

Man-torpedo-boat.

Darling-land mine-heart.

Hand-list-executioner.

Messenger-rope-prisoner.

Letter bomb-mailslot-last breath.

Lover-machine gun-corpse.

Corpse-lover-me.

Assembling My Shepherd

Thrown out of a third story window on acid late spring.

And I put my hand to his forehead to say: listen. Be still.

I am here. Sitting calmly on the sidewalk breathing glass

stuck to his broken body, transformed by sudden flight

so I held him. And was an unseen protector in the rarefied

atmosphere of an unsteady city. I get scared. I get

terrified and really it was my mother standing over him

as I watched from curtained windows—

how she wrapped him in a blanket. How she said: breathe.

How I sequenced my arms around my torso and saw

him coming through a crack in the window to take me with him,

she was all that stood between us, I built her a village

and hid behind the cistern when weather came, and when

I was a worm there was sun, and when I was a lion, sun,

her land had a quality of time that steadied me under the sun.

I get scared. I get so you slip in through a crack seeing I

saw your face, you had to be feared before you could be loved,

my mother held my shoulders and said you are a shepherd,

the village, torn down, I listen for your instructions

Never Morocco

I

The limits of our language are the limits

of our world coo-cooeth the philosopher

into my love’s tin ear (Tangier? But I was nowhere

near Morocco—) as he sucks a luminous

alphabet of smoke from the crack pipe,

as the alley weather turns from inadequate

to oceanic, as the picture is bamboozled

toward a more tented-Saharan-tea-party-

meets-nomadic-American-junkie motif—

to his east, neon Casbah blinks pistachio

and shocking pink, camels ache aimlessly

along the duned horizon, Where oh where

is my orange tree? my casablanca? In ruins—

here, he ignites—hermaphrodite

city folds in upon itself, spelling

swarms of retarded bees gone ritalin

among his inner trees you are not what

you say you are not what you say you are not—

II

You could be barefoot and heroic, addicted

to chain guns and rocket launchers

and still the desert would not need you

funny to be dying for the mirage’s

deranged marriage of distance

and liquid and realize everything

you’ve ever uttered is the projection

of a picture—sea of sand, flying

camel, sandstorm, Bedouin—you

are not where you say you are, epileptic

beneath the city’s dank and fogbanked

dawn, the book will kill the minaret

the alphabet will kill the icon, what

did the philosopher say that night,

beneath the never and the phantom

orange trees (pornography for the bindles,

rubberbands for the bucks?)—whisper lover

dying whisper again not breathing

III

And what is a “tree”? And what is “seeing”?

Big Rig the Baroque Sky

Stand still. Places move within us.

There was the impulse to flee and then there was

New Hampshire, with A, and our refugee vision

of being made more. Connected. Part of

as opposed to dismembered from the nature

program on public television. Once inside

we hoped it would be less of a reunion and more

a realization, your exile was self-imposed

or the door to the garden never closed

an oiled click would unlock the loamy frame—

in the futuristic city A and I described

a firefly dictatorship. Where meadows

would make us childlike. Beside a cult

of delphinium. Blessed. Following the simple

orientation of the sun. It was our prodigal vision:

forgotten reams of river will embrace us.

Feeling generally cast out, not knowing where

from. We drove in a big rig for days. Over water

of asphalt, Manhattan silver, then white, then

theoretical behind us, and above our big rig

the baroque sky, thickening with decoration

as we spoke of its “sandstone plates” and “Taj Mahal.”

At dusk swallows rose over the highway

like black questions of panic, cries—

where will I rest—dip, will my wings end

where the wind begins—

rise, do machines dream of spring,

of clouds perplexing their screens?

I objectify what I desire so I can feel

superior and arrived at a maple cathedral,

pledged allegiance to a hierarchy of back roads

and a lilac-green anarchy of light.

At the wet wood shack where syrup was made

A did not cut the wood vein

but he held the blade, beneath custodies

of palmate leaves and long-winged fruits.

We drank straight from the jug. Put our feet

in the river. Decoration disintegrated

as our toes became clear in the water,

what you’ve been all along

my trigger-finger stroked the channel

changer. And the impulse to flee was a waking

trance state of a sacred order, my Machiavellian

vision: there is no secure mode to possess us

without ruining us, and so the acquisition

turned to loss, say “exiled. And we never even

arrived.” Say “dismembered. And the baroque sky,”

say “new principality,” say “New Hampshire”

where everything we did was accompanied

by commentary from the leaves—

we can explain back roads and your impulse

to flee in terms of a single substance: water:

the blackest answer: we are never at rest:

and swallows: and factory machines: and

questions: arise