Lesley Wheeler

two poems

Spell for Evaporation of Hope, with Bibliomancy

Japanese Tales, Royall Tyler

Best to admit they never loved you, these strangers
among whom you lived and worked, these dear
damaged machines, creaking with the labor
of dragging their shadows around. They were built
of bewitched manuscripts and cold tea bags.
They were not humans at all but frightful demons!
They were too sad even to notice your thirst.
Rainbows straggle across muddy puddles: olive,
ocher, teal, marooned. Some call it perspective,
what happens when the demons wheel toward
a congealed horizon, but they are actually shrinking,
become dolls in the game you never weary
of playing. Set them down gently and strip off
that reenactor’s costume. Sun-scent stings like a
marigold’s. Aridity clacks against morning clouds.
Best to admit they never loved you, these strangers.

Dadaists are only to be found these days in the French Academy

with lines from Tristan Tzara

I.
If thought is made in the mouth, then mine carries infection. Symptoms include fever, unproductive cough, and fugitive reaction to monospot testing. No heterophile antibodies are manifest in this marginally poetic sample. Dr. Agon says so.

II.
migrants in jail=night sweats
nonsense=I am not in here today
cathedral=conflagration
middle age=mysterious disease
menopause=draconic
Mueller report=shed scales

III.
We have always made mistakes, but the greatest mistakes are the poems we have written. Poetry doubts everything. Poetry is religion. Poetry is a catbird bombing the delivery person. Poetry is a business, is the suspicious residue after meaning evacuates, is hackable, is the antidote to nondiagnosis. Lies circulate—

Poetry considers itself rather likeable.

IV.
Dr. Agon proposes alternate routes to composition. Impulses could become notions through the pangs of a woman’s right knee. Uninterested in saliva, thoughts could bypass the mouth and travel directly to fingers. These thoughts would remain unmoved by the high cost of medical care

Dr. Agon is a lizard in a lab coat. She pretends she is not a patient, impatient, horn-pated. She has
391 different attitudes and colors according to the sex of the president

Dr. Agon inconsistently considers herself likeable

V.
Expertise has been evacuated from the cathedral. Her lab coat stinks of ash. Her breath smokes, thoughtless. Poetry is all for it.

Screw equations like woman=women. There is no virgin microbe. Dr. Agon doesn’t go in for DADA. She is crossing a bridge over the Seine right now, on foot, because her wings are tired. Nothing makes sense and there is nowhere to go. But poetry, mouthless, down on its bad knee in the grit, scribbles a map to there.

Lesley Wheeler’s newest books include The State She’s In, her fifth poetry collection; Unbecoming, her first novel; and Poetry’s Possible Worlds, a book of hybrid essays (forthcoming in 2021 from Tinderbox). Recent work appears in The Common, Gettysburg Review, Ecotone and other journals. Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, she lives in Virginia and blogs at lesleywheeler.org.