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I was profligate like a floodlight to the sun.
Hoarded saccharine and toothmarks,
wanted only the thickest rhymes, two of each.
Full I was of promises I never intended to keep:
puckered laughter, lines to feast.
I let everyone who entered my life enter through me.
Demanded nonsense love and bodies that would ring.
Not to mention higher kilowatts
of creeping joy, more red in everything—
From Eye Level. Copyright © 2018 by Jenny Xie. Used by permission of Graywolf Press.
after Etel Adnan
And there,
between clean walls
you assume
the position,
angled toward
the red squares
roiling
on her canvases.
Never mind the distances traveled, the companion
she made of herself. The threadbare twenties not
to be underestimated. A wild depression that ripped
from January into April. And still she sprouts an appetite.
Insisting on edges and cores, when there were none.
Relationships annealed through shared ambivalences.
Pages that steadied her. Books that prowled her
until the hard daybreak, and for months after.
Separating new vows from the old, like laundry whites.
Small losses jammed together so as to gather mass.
The lightest realizations arrive in restraint—
so the old masters tell us.
Not unlike the tug at the end of a line.
We have language for what is within reach
but not the mutable form behind it.
Or else, why write.
I’m sick of peering at the ego.
No, my ego’s tired of peering at me—
It’s she who awakens me into being.
So it goes: the seer mistaken for the seen.