Three Poems

Catherine Imbriglio

ROSARY

A figure of a man was in the water at the place

where they usually crossed the stream. First they weren’t sure

that the figure wasn’t actually a body but then they could tell

the limbs were filled with sand. Crossing the stream

made her feel drawn to scale. Each part of that distance

had to be dismembered to be understood, like the times

when he gave her his hand so she could get across to the bank,

or when she remembered she used to call sleep “sand.”

She kept on walking, but she was afraid of being drawn in,

recessively. She wanted to know whose scale.

A scale might tell her she was gaining too much weight

or it could give her a set of worldly properties.

That there is an angle to the rain could mean

she would like to catch something. More likely

she was after the approval of strangers. Saying this

might be an imbalance of belief, but a definition

is more valuable when it is uneven in its equivalence.

Maybe a life could be saved.

When they walked along the shore the small stones

clicked like determined beads. It was like a catalogue

of getting dark. Since a light is always capable

of being extinguished, she thought the threat of dark

was what gave light its complexity. She wanted the light

as a testament for her body: Tell me I am to be guessed at

like the water which keeps on going. But when night came

there were many lights. They seemed to undermine

the sky’s opacity. She loved them out of all proportion,

as if they held a deep feeling there.

TRISKELION

She used the neighbor’s roof as a reference point, liking its precarious congruity,

a mobile performative at the sightline: what a woman thinks about

before she conceives. See how they run, driven with carelessness,

clouds cutting up over the rooftop like comedians, like blind mice

dispensing with threes. As this was a theatrical positioning,

I sat between them, trifocally, an intermediate vision

held commonly at arm’s length: Take my hand, I can’t see.

The boundaries of the third term blurred, there is in some part

a percentage of the other part, May as a fifth month or an auxiliary,

each a dispensable conditioning, given the farmer’s wife,

who, at this point, may be reaching out a hand to cover the distance,

as if to carve out a bridge or a tree.

A trial balloon: how to mediate a trivium, that which belongs

at the crossroads, hence common, what everyone knows. Coming after

the sun has passed the meridian, composed in the form of three

relatively constrained parts, trifolium or trihedron,

she is back at the old schedule, which without a third term

is like the wife’s anticipation, the news

of a death always coming in threes.

The sixth column may assist the fifth, or it may oppose it,

the one side pertaining to real significance rather than to form, i.e., give us

your mother’s maiden name for security purposes. I am worried about

your throat, a common experience indicating a slight shift in sympathy

among three branches, whose radiations from the center

can participate in only two arcs. To assume the proscenium as true,

as necessary to go on, after seeing the mice had gnawed away rings of bark

(called “girdling”), their eyes met only once all night, as if they were escaping

from division into two groups supposed to be exhaustive.

Meanwhile, she was staging an arcade: with respect to the roof, the moon

a saw blade, a builder’s instrument; with respect to the bridge,

her hands are tied, like wings on either side of the arch.

REST AREA

Her dream was the earth being smashed by the sun.

There was no heat, but the space was filled space; every day

the sun drew more of the blue from it. The earth woman spoke first,

so that her brother/husband wasn’t pleased, though it was not

the imperfect vision of a practice dream. Drawing on her dream

gives off a small portion of what is appositional. The edge of the earth

blocks out the bottom portion, but I am not fooling with augury now.

If you close your eyes in an unfamiliar place between gardens, that space

will be reduced to the limits of her body. Or, once the sun exhausts

its hydrogen, each dream will proceed to the red giant stage.

Processing a patch of dandelion weeds which look like repossessed suns

is called the binding problem. In a sequential system, a touched object

in no sense corresponds to a sight object, the feel of petal and stem

to the image of petal and stem. She wanted a pointillist’s dream.

She sat hooded in the mist figuring how to “powder” constellations.

The dandelions looked like go-betweens.

In an ordinary drawing, you could perceive the earth and sun

as flat bodies or you could half manipulate them like her dream.

Sometimes she’ll not comprehend which is the lying sense, feeling

or seeing, according to your temperament. It would make a mission

out of looking through her things. That interchangeable subject is out

of proportion to one’s usual relation to a dream. If the primary wavelength

exists outside her limits, you’ll feel the subject always leaving you.

Her eye won’t see it, since it is going beyond the course established

for her dream: a star taking up with other stars, absorbing

the primal medium as it perishes in you.