Three by Katherine Larson!

Love at Thirty-two Degrees

                               I

Today I dissected a squid,

the late acacia tossing its pollen

across the black of the lab bench.

In a few months the maples   

will be bleeding. That was the thing:   

there was no blood

only textures of gills creased like satin,   

suction cups as planets in rows. Be careful

not to cut your finger, he says. But I’m thinking

of fingertips on my lover’s neck   

last June. Amazing, hearts.

This brachial heart. After class,

I stole one from the formaldehyde

& watched it bloom in my bathroom sink

between cubes of ice.

                               II

Last night I threw my lab coat in the fire   

& drove all night through the Arizona desert   

with a thermos full of silver tequila.

It was the last of what we bought   

on our way back from Guadalajara—

desert wind in the mouth, your mother’s   

beat-up Honda, agaves   

twisting up from the soil

like the limbs of cephalopods.

Outside of Tucson, saguaros so lovely

considering the cold, & the fact that you   

weren’t there to warm me.

Suddenly drunk I was shouting that I wanted to see the stars   

as my ancestors used to see them—

to see the godawful blue as Aurvandil’s frostbitten toe.

                               III

Then, there is the astronomer’s wife   

ascending stairs to her bed.

The astronomer gazes out,   

one eye at a time,

to a sky that expands   

even as it falls apart

like a paper boat dissolving in bilge.

Furious, fuming stars.

When his migraine builds &

lodges its dark anchor behind

the eyes, he fastens the wooden buttons

of his jacket, & walks

outside with a flashlight

to keep company with the barn owl   

who stares back at him with eyes

that are no greater or less than

a spiral galaxy.

The snow outside

is white & quiet

as a woman’s slip

against cracked floorboards.

So he walks to the house

inflamed by moonlight, & slips

into the bed with his wife   

her hair & arms all

in disarray

like fish confused by waves.

                               IV

Science—

beyond pheromones, hormones, aesthetics of bone,

every time I make love for love’s sake alone,

I betray you.

   ****

Broke the Lunatic Horse

The Milky Way sways its back

across all of wind-eaten America

like a dusty saddle tossed

over your sable, lunatic horse.

All the plains are dark.

All the stars are cowards;

they lie to us about their time of death

and do nothing but dangle

like a huge chandelier

over nights when our mangled sobs

make the dead reach for their guns.

I must be one of the only girls

who still dreams in green gingham, sees snow

as a steel pail’s falling of frozen nails

like you said through pipe smoke

on the cabin porch one night.  Dear one,

there are no nails more cold

than those that fix you

underground.  I thought I saw you

in the moon of the auditorium

after my high school dance.

Without you, it’s still hard to dance.

It’s even hard to dream.

   ****

Statuary

The late cranes throwing
their necks to the wind stay
somewhere between
the place that rain begins
and the place that it ends
they seem to exist just there
above the horizon at least
I only see them that way
tossed up
against the gray October
light not heavy enough
for feet to be useful or
useless enough to make
gravity untie its string. I’m sick
of this stubbornness
but the earthworms
seem to think it all right
they move forward
and let the world pass
through them they eat
and eat at it, content to connect
everything through
the individual links
of their purple bodies to stay
one place would be death.
But somewhere between
the crane and the worm
between the days I pass through
and the days that pass
through me
is the mind. And memory
which outruns the body and
grief which arrests it.

Katherine Larson