Chelsea Wagenaar
Two POEMS
Sestets
WITH A LINE BY SIMONE WEIL
Two forces rule the universe: light & gravity.
The child fills the mother’s belly,
suspended as a winged thing in the web of her ribs.
Sunlight passes through her skin:
the luminaria world of shape & shift.
Afloat, he turns, turns,
until her pelvis is his crown.
Defiant, now: but loosening in his heavy cloud.
* * *
Uppgivenhetssyndrom
In Switzerland, refugee children denied asylum
sometimes slip into an unwakeable sleep for months.
We have no word for this in English. Not sleep because no rest.
Not coma because no disease, no harm to the body.
Put them by windows, the doctors say, let the light enter their skin
& wind the circadian clock of their exile.
* * *
Twilight. The pines saw the light in half
& nail it to the grass. I walk the planks
beneath the nascent cones, opaline in their sap caul
& drop to my knees to search. Two forces rule the universe:
light & gravity. My grassblade sift yields this seed—
daughter’s tooth—pink cling of its broken root.
* * *
A dragonfly moves in cursive
over the flaming stalks of tiger lilies.
Tigers willies, she repeats. Her soft halation of hair
is the crayon sun I drew for her—
not light, not fire, not filament—
just a bright, brief scribbling on the air.
* * *
Each night my voice becomes the light
that ferries her
into the dark of sleep. You are my sunshine, my only sunshine . . .
It takes eight minutes & twenty seconds for sunlight to reach earth.
By this time
her eyes are closed,
her breath pulled along in the deep undertow of dreams,
that other gravity to which we surrender our lives.
Anniversary
“TO LOVE PURELY IS TO CONSENT TO DISTANCE.” —SIMONE WEIL
The other night you woke me
to ask who was ringing our doorbell.
We don’t have a doorbell,
I replied, and in this way
didn’t answer your question.
(How to love you enough
to speak to your dreams?)
Once in a strange fluorescent bathroom
we ate chicken wings over double sinks.
Just you and me and what the mirror
said about us:
I wore a white blouse,
you bowed your head
for each bite. (No—the question
is not one of enough.) I wish for us to love
without context, and afterward to cool
in the dark like a modest rubble
of pale, brittle bones.
To open the door
and tell the mysterious guest
in the white blouse,
her finger on the faint bell,
from now on, just walk in.
Chelsea Wagenaar is the author of Mercy Spurs the Bone, winner of the 2013 Philip Levine Prize. She holds a PhD from the University of North Texas, and her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Southern Review and Poetry Northwest. She is currently a postdoctoral Lilly Fellow at Valparaiso University.