I spent so much
I could have learned
a language
instead
I often thought
atop a papered table
angels attending
to my perfection
pore by needled pore
so I spent
what I could
on what
I did
instead of anything
a winnowing
not one thing
but the other
what I didn’t
want from
what I did
stretched flat
on my back
my breasts
such that they were
receded
gone wherever
Myra’s went
to hell
for the harrowing
then back again
next week
I waxed I waned
I lost I gained
it was slow then
fast no never though
more than once I
thought I saw
the needle move
or that it had
moved rather
I could have
sworn but so
slowly oh
I spent so much
supine
or else curled
on my right
prone to remembering
given to songs
to remind me
how or what I’d
been when they were
new or
new to me or now
a new song
would find me
where I’d been
at some point
marked with something
sharp a place
felt everywhere
when pressed
I got bored of music
I’d spent so much
by then I turned
on the lives of others
a book I mean
a very long one
a very good one
the women in it
were like me
the women in it
were unlike me
it was
about that
the ways women
are like and unlike
one another
among other
things it was about
everything
I didn’t know
a book could
hold the whole
of life like that
I listened
I thought
there is so much
I don’t know
the language
the book was written in
for instance
and still fewer
chances to correct
the course
of my ignorance
this was what
I’d chosen after all these
horizontal hours
my one thing
from the others
my fire
against the firmament
my stinging
singing fate
Why do things get blue from far away
Why do mountains?
How do some grow small and others
loom, as they ever did—
Your slouching figure going on higher than me forever
from the German by Lotte Lehmann
So again I hear your voice, the sound
Of which used to make my heart quake.
I have to laugh
At the surfacing illusion.
How funny—I hardly understand
How this one could seem like the one.
And still I have tears to spare
For the correction of that error.
Whether afterwards
in some future
I should take the air
and if I drive
and if you please
meet me
there, alongside
the carriage
and stay
riding awhile.
We must not speak.
I must not
look at you.
Don’t make me
though I’ll miss your
horse’s
handsome face.
Jameson Fitzpatrick is the author of Pricks in the Tapestry (Birds, LLC, 2020). The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts, she teaches first-year writing at New York University.
Neil Rick is a gardener and photographer in Tennessee. He grows flowers and then photographs them, overlaying the photos but doing no post-production altering. His images have won multiple prizes at American Rose Society Meetings in Tennessee and Kentucky, including Best Novice at a national ARS meeting in 2019 and “King of Photography” at a 2022 show in Bowling Green, KY.
