This piece appears in the LARB Print Quarterly Journal: No. 19, Romance
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¤
so, Ecstasy
And after LOVE had wept and eaten
The burning heart, my burning
Heart, and LOVE our Lord, Lord, Lord
So awakened but not in horror but, yes, berserk, so:
Human, so wanted beyond, so: ECSTASY,
So: not human but ALL as in without ORDER,
So wept, made into the vessel that which must be made,
Confronted: so less life and more,
So ECSTASY, finally legible, without the formal
DRAG of the body, leaf upon leaf in the morning
Street, so past desire as a tree just beyond a wooden fence,
Invisible, in its possession and slow convulsions,
Hemorrhaging between night and the memory
Of waking as the wind, the night, the bleeding stars
Which is how I awaken in you, as you. Inside. Out. Begun.
¤
Which has no memory, ECSTASY, beginning
In the middle, always late but slightly on time,
The way I enter you, which is an asking,
Berserk as any nag beauty so LOVE
Without the chaste harnesses of redemption, Us:
Somewhere after, tossed, like money fleeced of its money,
Grip, so wild and without use, so useful because without
Expectation, so without error, so desire moving backward,
Beyond opinion or the pinions of the body — so ECSTASY,
My mouth staggering to close upon your nipple —
Tree dwindling down to its birth-seed, PROGRESS:
Finally, a music made without progress or the hint
Of ascension, which is how ascension is reached:
Rain banally falling into a field
Unaware a whole forest of elms rising from it in three days.
LARB Contributor
Roger Reeves is a poet. His work has appeared in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Best American Poetry, and Tin House, among others. He was awarded a 2015 Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a 2013 NEA Fellowship, and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation in 2008. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas-Austin. His first book is King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), which won the Larry Levis Reading Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University, the Zacharis Prize from Ploughshares, and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award.
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