Two
poems from Anthony Lacavaro's No More Magic Town
followed
by a note on the author
An
Essay on the Body
Today,
in an essay titled Self-Acknowledgement
In The Shower, tiny, countless,
joyful, Oedipal
Tragedies lingered around the drain, hung themselves
In
the corners within which you want to believe
You are alone. Who doesn’t?
Only then
Does the genealogy that brought you here
Come to light: dark contours
of the body, turned
From taboos to touchstones, had their own tales
Acting
out shanghais like those in the dark ports
Of Malaysia, Old London. You saw
the world
In places you least expected, fantastic tales
Of the grotesque
and cities moving into industrialization
And away from the fields. Though in
your defense,
You embraced your fields and felt a bit sad
At the decision
to head in that particular direction.
Blue
Roan
No more light, no more dark
Asides lending our conversation
That
enviable air: no more looks,
No more stares out the window
When spotted:
no more windows,
Though
a poor man offers nothing
After tearing down something, flawed
As
it may be; so less than
I now consider how what is lost
Had always been
broken.
No,
less than kindness to keep
Considering: no more thoughts
On
the matter: another sleep
Then, that passes a night
That then ticks into
another day,
Which
will pose the question again:
How much water can I shuttle
Between
my hands? As much night
As that sleep allows? Would I return
To you afterward,
my hands still
Feeling
for what didn’t meet me,
What went and was broken?
I
suppose we could have gone
On the same way we had
For ages since: who was
younger
When
we started and now who
Bothers to care about details
Such
as us anymore?
Does the light? Does the dark
Let us not forget how the world
won’t
Divide
neatly, no matter
What its leaders maintain?
If
I have to give up some sidelong
Look of possibility because
I had so long
refused to say simply,
Then
it is given over to what ought
To be better, what ought to
Be
understood and every day isn’t:
This is to say nothing simple
Remains
or could: no light and dark
Sides
of the planet, which ought to
Be the joy of residence on a ball,
No
edges and a comforting science built
On revolving forces, to remind how
What
was dark spins into light into dark,
And
even where darkest, a reflection
From some distant light source tells us
There
is always another in
The universe to muddle darkness, no matter
What the
presidents endorse.
Too
much light, too much dark
Assigned to strangers and other believers,
Assigned
in a heavenly voice,
The same voice that announces
Softly and sibilantly
we have broken:
Surprising,
since I’d have thought
Eternity belonged to the lower registers,
Notes
that must be eased down from a
Far away light: far away dark
Asides resume
and another air
Perfumes
conversation: never fear
The return: what is broken, always lost,
The
most muddled an easy separation,
White combed through, blue roan,
Separating
… my hands, without night,
With
no feeling of water thickening touch,
Could almost go palms up,
To
be done with it and its makers,
Its Saturday-night-fun-come-Sunday
Heartbreakers,
and they would,
If
they could not reach out and feel
For an absent hand: but along the nerves
A
complication runs in which I
Am always newly surprised
To discover never
just one love
To
be thought of, always constellations more,
When, that hand missing, a love
then goes.
©
Anthony
Lacavaro was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1972, and earned his BA from
Hamilton College and MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He lives
in Jackson Heights, New York and works in Manhattan at a bank. His work has appeared
in the New Republic, the Paris Review, Southwest Review,and
the Yale Review among others.
"An
Essay on the Body" first appeared in the Paris Review; "Blue
Roan" first appeared in Southwest Review.
