[I have had to learn the simplest things last. Which made for difficulties.]

by Alexandra Teague

 

Seagulls of Cardiff, small gods of the unravel,
trash-blusterers, street screechers, chimney-pot clouds
sweeping yourselves away to sky
on grey days when all my luggage
for a year of living is still lost, and Bishop’s So many things
seem filled with the intent is an escalator
looping up and up too steep for me to ride; repeating
one too-trim line for the scatterage
of garbage at the concrete stoop, the see-through dress
bought from the last shop closing when the train pulled in;
the fabric’s feathers like pastel peacocks or some mythic bird
at the gateway of the land of What Is Ours And Will Never Go Away:
that empty lot
where the sign has rusted through and only you
keep landing, screaming baguette, orange rind, fish,
dragging the damp, lost innards of this world toward
beaky light—dragging the innards we don’t want to see
because of whatever else we want
too much: Each next flat to be my home. Myself
to seem arranged (in my missing bra and missing skirt
and missing clip) (more fully wearing them without them
than I ever did). What sort of daemon
that despite myself I’ve always loved, that thinks instead
in storms and seasons, hatch of ants (whose acids
make you drunk, the papers say); that snatches sandwiches
mid-bite and dive-bombs cancer patients
wheeled to hospital lawns, not caring
what they’ve lost—lifting to sky whatever food you can:
more manna maybe than it ever was. For you, the city has hired
a hawk (named Jack) to circle City Hall, so you’ll think he roosts
where, beautifully shameless, hordes of you call
more hordes to wade the cobbled slush. Unnamed. Or named
as Scourge, you split black plastic bags like mussels
outside every door I think could be (should be)
mine, then lose. Where the garment gapes, Barthes says,
is what seduces most. Harbingers of my childhood Gulf,
the mud flats, fish in oil tankers’ wakes, your wings
indignantly alive as Yeats’ desert birds, remind me now
I’m most alive when the world’s intent and my intentions
angle so far off that hunger leaks, and the sea
swarms in, and I cannot say for certain
what should be mine to love.

---

ALEXANDRA TEAGUE is most recently the author of Or What We’ll Call Desire (Persea, 2019). Her prior books are The Wise and Foolish Builders and Mortal Geography, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and the California Book Award in Poetry, and the novel The Principles Behind Flotation, as well as the co-edited Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. Alexandra has recently returned from Cardiff, Wales, to Moscow, Idaho, where she is a professor at the University of Idaho.