Hera Lindsay Bird by Hera Lindsay Bird

Author:Hera Lindsay Bird
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141987415
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

PLANET OF THE APES

If there is a designated point at which return

becomes of no return, so far is how far

I am always beyond it.

We sit in the rain of your hangover

and I tell you the story about my dead aunt

who spent her sixteenth year digging a giant hole

in the field behind her house and never said why.

Anna I love you.

I love you in the jittering shade of a historic windmill.

I love you standing in the water wearing the river

like an invisible pair of shoes. I love you here

at the beginning of your only life and almost gone

getting high on your porch, light drifting between us

like ghost sequins.

I’ve always never felt this way about anyone

but the way in which I’ve never felt about you

is a way of never feeling so new it’s somehow old

like a cave painting of a fax machine

or falling asleep in the attic of a spaceship.

You make me want to think of you in a sentence with me in it.

You make me want to find a collapsed mineshaft

I can call your name in while searching for you.

You make me want to tell you what you make me want

but what can I even say to you—riding a desk chair

through the afternoon like a patron saint

of remaindered office furniture.

I don’t know what it means

to walk each night into a field alone

and dig, until you are standing in a hole so deep

you cannot be seen above ground.

I don’t know what it means to fall asleep on your porch

and wake with the illustrated guide to Planet of the Apes open in my hands.

I don’t know what it means to wake each morning and love you

and say nothing, as if nothing

were honesty’s default, or maybe just a way

for me to avoid the stupid things I need to tell you like

looking at you is like looking at a beautiful person far away

through a telescope that makes you seem the size you almost are

which is something I mean but don’t understand

like the new hieroglyphics of songbirds

or how the world in which I’m saying this to you

is already receding

that looking at you is like looking

backwards out the window of a slow-moving helicopter

into the nineteenth-century cornfield of your face

which my historical inaccuracy

has suddenly emptied of birds.

You make my life feel the size of itself.

You make my life a burning craft

on some distant and unintended hillside.

Anna you are the pale green arm

of the Statue of Liberty

reaching up through miles of sand

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