Lucy Ives, Five Poems
"To All Other Things What I Prefer Most Is Thinking What I Really Think"
To all other things what I prefer most is thinking what I really think
Even if I cannot say the words in a blue room dressed with diners and
recognized official faces dripping with very little save advice and allergies
Outdoors is a garden dripping with ferns where comes an orange-eyed cat
with a green branch, with a hollow green branch he has strung like a guitar
My blue hand slips in to scratch behind his pearly ear and then flies off
again like a bird: he turns his head like he would begin
but that was a bird
Why is it so far off
I can tell you how selfish I’ve become, this wasn’t a necessary transformation
I am telling you this as you look for the bird, I lie back with my back bent
over a star, with my long scaled back wrapped around a star
now sucking the hot tip of my finger
the face of the cat is your face and it burns
you smile like so many kitchens, pulling your white fur socks up
to make your way back to the party
Meanwhile the only thing filling my body is money
Now and then the scent of lucre drips from my eye in a gooey pearl
The people inside love a musical cat
The stars retreat like wheels
"It Could Be a Kind of Hatred For You, My Offering: What If We Call It That"
It could be a kind of hatred for you, my offering: what if we call it that
Here in the big, big public worlds, paths of chalky mystique stretching out
to the horizon: I can’t be like myself here, generalize the head to “good”
and that should do the trick, that should be enough to allow us to
get back to the process without discussion
It means nothing for me to lean towards you and whisper a string of birds
And whisper a necklace of clicking clay balls, the padded glossy one
the dog took in her teeth the other night off of the sidewalk and I kept
getting worried because I did not have a leash for her
People who say that it’s a good idea to go to school are wrong.
No one in school thinks it’s a good idea. No one out of school can tell
you what you want apparently, they just do not have the tools, they just
do not have the time and the correct flexibility of “however” to understand
what living inside a perfect time is like: what it is like
to have another Euclidean hour and then the shiny white
we must be up against, how much time is this taking
"It's Not a Person Who Teaches You To Speak: That is an Observation I Can Make Under The Night Sky"
It’s not a person who teaches you to speak: That is an observation I can make under the night sky
held down under a long pin, the clock shoots up to the center of the year
The clock smiles under its mustache hefting a rope in its hands, ready to demonstrate its skill
But I’m turning my back on that, let the seconds sew themselves where they may
It grows very quiet on the reverse, on the inside of the pond
at the back of the glittering suicide’s neck, where none but a stray trout comes
to touch with thready bluish lips the skin and hairs of one who threw
himself from the window of a plane, no who dropped
from the basket of a balloon in passing, now who
is not remembered. What was it about the seeds he strung?
The trout will never know. The trout fits itself back into the canoe
of its muddy nest and sleeps under the winter
The trout is sleeping like a stick inside its dream when it learns to speak
And it emits a copper key whole like a domesticated animal emerging from its mouth
And I’m going to reach down now and get
this item, I am standing at the bottom of the world, on my right the
gate of red horn, on my left the gate of ivory
White roots hang from the ceiling above, and behind my back I hear the
paper bodies of unlucky souls
I remember the argument as it was put to me
Does the man leave by the gate of false dreams? Or no I stretch my arm
"Somebody Needs to Say What He Really Means, That's My Current Foremost Opinion"
Somebody needs to say what he really means, that’s my current foremost opinion
or “intention,” come to think of it
Why o why have I been blessed
not to land on a single image only keep circling round the aggregate
(“the crowd”) hoping
for an open inch of will
Believe me, as I believe you, and we can both go down in flames
We can remember, we already have knowledge of each other, as in
the deep, deep past
gold geraniums glowing where your eyes had been as you were laid to rest
in a canoe below the earth
Whatever
It gets to the point where the king does nothing
Yet let a man with a baseball bat appear to contact this skull—
ahh here comes a sea of gauzes ready to escort me home
the mermaid on her skate of pearls
and certain curtains floating all over the stage, etc, but what IS that?
When you are so lone and ancient in your little interior doll and ready
not to invent a single fucking thing
And ready to sew your own face into an impervious envelope
And keep notes in a book of days
Let it be said that what she wrote was so much like what had happened as to be
“very much like it”
Let it be said in that case it was hard to find her
Snuggled up with so much truth
the white bound to blind us, “WE” who sought “her”
And of course at this point it must be admitted nobody was here
save the speaker
clapping her two wooden faces
so that all the water sticking to them
fell
and the river which grew from her doorstep—
No one cares now if there is a river
"To Find the Particular Place and Then to Hold On To It"
To find the particular place and then to hold onto it
The streets were wet where I was walking, what a phenomenal force she used to be
I said to myself as a white wraith rode out on a rope of light that went
Straight out horizontal from one eye of an ambulance
Burning rubber, the on-off flashes, getting away and just thinking
That’s ok, I tell myself, trying to enter one of the clouds passing overhead
I keep remembering what you said before we watched those stupid videos
And now how I peel the sticky paper off my eyes
You can’t look at your own ability to see, you have to just look
So I want to: at the candles jumping across the table on the tv
over the knifed-in name of the devil
They lock him in the ceiling
He makes a kingdom of the air, showing his teeth, making both a rule and a display out of his feeling
walking the long earth so active he can never get over it
How have I come to aspire to this also
From my forehead grow two wispy antennae and I go past a lot of stores
carrying gray boxes in my skull and putting your cool words in them
(Delight)
Have you ever thought it is strange how you have to talk to so many people each day who don’t need your existence
Who don’t need your weird existence like
I don’t need yours, reader
O push the clouds away, O push away the thick silk mat of me coming towards you
Push now the barrier in your mouth
A whole hill of tissue a whole room
We either say no words or weep into it