Mudlark Poster No. 67 (2007)
Psyche Cycle by Amy Pence for Chris Psyche’s Lament | Armor / Amore | Sex in the Dark | Stamens | Plumage Briars | Seeds | Sacral | Water | Interior Castle | Boon of the Underworld Amy Pence has a chapbook Skin’s Dark Night from 2River Press, 2003. Other poems have appeared in New American Writing, StorySouth, and American Letters & Commentary. She teaches college English and lives among many trees in Carrollton, Georgia, with her daughter, Ada, and husband, Chris Aanstoos.
Psyche’s Lament
I suffered, and I knew not why. Trees dreamed so close at your window. Their suffering both aching and rooted, wrapped firmly in the earth’s knuckles. Your wings, Eros, beat too close, too close—. The bird in my chest would not come loose. And above it all, the lovely: the lovely saturnalia, the shadowed ambergris. The lovely is all body in the dark. Though blind, I knew abundance—then suffering: the lovely opens me wide, yet finds me wanting; netted in your glut of trees, trapped by the beating wings, the wings’ beating. Armor / Amore
The mettle of
trembling whir
my
dark-hooded dream
motion:
blinding
opalesces salt
on our tongues
until I no longer see you to
penetrate,
until you are null: my sisters’ know
who you are, warnings: stone-arm
winged,
I leave my
lover Our bodies— their held errors. Hands at each silky interior:
no light but the runged nautilus where the beast chambers. A cock sleeping. Rich your back when I am against it, rubbing walls that arch your hieroglyphic dreams. Two fingers up into my center. Reticulated arch: raised flute of my body’s only Eros.
Heat at the globe of my center: I mistook you for terror. Clicked on the light. Sonic clap as you left— my mistake. Briars
My body’s open field saturated with particulars. My panic, a heliotrope turning to the god’s next mercy. Furrows where, cleft, I eviscerate. Seeds
Uroboros that I cleave for this sorting: the ants— my sacral nurslings— kiss the earth. Eros: a dangerous secret seeding inside me. Sheep rise with wool exteriors from mist, ruinous tire tracks.
Like a beggar I pilfer your things— to find it:
the old bothered metaphor for who I am: the fleece of the ram, the god in me sheared and golden, collecting among the dry twigs of the self. Crystalline shards: the past with its anchored regret. I am flooded inside, calling you: your absence burns like blue water. The modernity of my body shifts its crystal goblet breaks in the mouth of great birds. To meet you as I am, quenched by every desire. The Interior Castle
Neck upon the swelling Rodin. No fissure in the dream’s flight under leaves: the pathless path: soil to loam my skin, its blank-to-blank. Labial,
to roam the dark rooms, down to
the hidden bruise of the underworld: our
very Aphrodite. The Boon of the Underworld
No cohesion, but my body pulled towards that sweet pang of death. I walk the streambed: its bottom marbled with shards, a black sediment we could not mine together. If not for your plumage. In my teeth, the flat coins, in my hands barley
cake. Drowning man, hideous dog, the knitted orifice made
by the fates. If not for your eyes to inebriate the sky. In
the seat of the sacrum Pluto’s
rape: his soft concubine with her
ointment. To have come so close then to succumb: If not for the promise of beauty, its sleep. As if the self would not age, but rise forever with its crenellated petals. When I open the cask, the god-sleep of nothing: In the end, you, Eros, return—bend pliantly to my mistake. If not for our embodiment: a hum and
sweet effacing. Between us: nothing/ everything—the
mundane and the deepening particular,
our emptiness/fullness to
each other—yet one tier of pleasure. Our
aging into nothing, another.
Copyright © Mudlark 2007 |