Rebecca Wolff
Rebecca Wolff was born in 1967 in New York City, dropped out of Bennington College, received her BA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including BOMB, Boston Review, Grand Street, Open City, and The Paris Review. Wolff is the author of Manderley (University of Illinois Press, 2001), a National Poetry Series selection, and Figment (Norton, 2004), winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. Wolff founded the literary magazine Fence in 1997 and its imprint Fence Books in 2001. Recently the Visiting Writer-in-Residence at Boise State University in Idaho, Wolff is a poetry instructor at The New School, a freelance editor, and the editor of The Constant Critic, a poetry review website. She lives in Hudson, New York, with her husband, the fiction writer Ira Sher, and their two children, Asher Wolff and Margot Sher.
Press Play
In your truck without a notion, fighting a lot of feeling
with a huge supply of answers, we are listeners.
By this dim lighting that we sometimes find disquieting
songs play, stiff vocal support for common
tears, tears rising fast
and falling down like the dysfunctional word it is.
Turn my cheek to you: fuzz, deflected angle. You see me.
My face toward you I see you, the gauzy lens of you.
Messenger, decrease the pressure of the song on me.
Lie down with me. It can’t be that I don’t love you.
Every second rocketing, summoned.
What will we have once our songs
are relegated to their place? A rise
in the level of substandard expectancy,
a fluttering without correction in the ear
of the candidate, an indigenous people gone
delinquent, marginalized.
You must guess and guess again. Terrible waters
break over my head. I hum opportunistically,
fantasizing several eventualities. We speak less, we
kiss and kiss until the kiss
falls meaningless.
Sybil
1. These are the vague demands you make on me
2. (that I) assemble
(to) recollect
(to) decode
( ) associate
3. that I admit, fraught with difficulty, reintegration
is no day at the beach in eggshell tints
“The inmates start to get brave and a little crazy”
when they hear that friendly voice—the matron.
4. (But that’s also my mind, lost)
Her epic poem on the constraints society places on the
5. misunderstood.
6. Everything can’t be…a product of imagination
The reasons for doing this are many and variable
and I’m ready for my close-up…
7. You know that scrimshaw’s been outlawed
Finally, they tried an antipsychotic on me
This had an unexpectedly positive effect
on the general population, the dissimulation,
the oppression
8. the faint aroma of performing seals.
With that same arrogant look on his face,
a man related to you commits suicide
in a dark room, tonight. I am “a psychic,”
but she is psychic
Sarcasm not in her repertoire.
9. If you are transparent it is for transcendence.
A good friend, she hears herself telling me
“there is more to my essential character,
more that is most essentially me.”
10. Don’t think of how much time we’ve wasted
blood on your protruding lower lip
the dead hours are really dead
(inchoate)
(insensate)
11. with such good will and sex
appeal young girls descend
the staircase. My ears ring
and my vision fails. I must be
speaking the truth
12. …the cat came back.
Padding on sore paws over ninety miles
to the old homestead,
destroyed by fire
13. the bull moose lets out a roar.
Making the music I’m famous for.
Rope’s indulgence gives
14. …the void rushes in.
Is that a musket mounted
on the wide-planked wall?
Or a yoke?
15. Something brainless about that half
of the bracket.
The registration
of sound on my mind,
16. it was as though she’d placed them there for me to see.
I am only in the picture at one end
—this is probably more than you ever wanted to know
about me. Men outside.
I’m a woman
in a pastel field.
What I want out of a
fuck-scene: continuity. In
fear of you.
Lamb, Willow: An Arch Dolefulness Has Taken Me This Far
If you like Chance
and you think you might live forever
listen: They say death comes to us all.
They say: Tuesday Death comes to everybody.
Then if you really think about it,
it starts to seem unlikely,
dust the most forgiving
of all elements. Rinsed clean, I am, I say, through
no particular effort.
Once more I am in the right place but with the wrong feelings.
Festival of Mysteries, Carnival of Absolute Purchasing Power.
Damp-earth smell rises up
from the rigid enclosure,
terraced zone of eternal rest. I brought myself here
for one whole day; I bought an all-day
pass. Flashbulb pops off in the exclusive crypt:
You said you wanted to see…
Here is a machine that kills
cancer. By liquefying
cells and freezing them and then cracking the bad cells
into a million pieces and vacuuming them up with a tiny
nozzle. It’s so effective, we are all
living long lives. You made your living
as a nurse in the old country.
Only the knowledge that I had done it before
allowed me to think that I could possibly
do it again. The demystification of meantime
into a magic circle—it is, essentially,
mine: my job to make it smarter, a dog
and puppy show. Illimitless
deep pathos of the infant cosmology;
amusement park of abbreviation.
More important the unlimited freefall
in the spot you bury your demon:
It goes down,
while you grow up, and last the centuries
as a lamb or willow
Lamb or willow,
wherever you go,
fear
the living and the dead
inertial and nocturnal
energies a winding shroud
(I was born
with a yellow brain
and cannot make up stories)
it can be as short as you want it
it can be as long as you want it.
That’s not your temperature, that’s
a homemade contaminant.
Spacious Sity of Eternal Rest
of rectangular shape wherein I will find
coagulate.
Rinsed clean, I am, I say, and
it hardly matters
Spring, Summer, Winter
From the land, the water
from the water, the land
instrument to medium in the meantime
stuck out here in the devastation in the forest
in the middle of fucking nowhere
between landmass and incontinence
camp and derangement, the more songlike
the further we row
from our figmented shore