topographies I
Every angle the head moves in can be compassionate: a warm regard, greeting, disclosure, a constant blending. Can you wear the collective goodness of others like a death mask?
I work to achieve balance, the right proportions of complimenting responses and emotional mirroring. A little aubergine next to the sunny yolk. And the plate could use some red among all the beige and recognizable foods. It’s like Thanksgiving: the aesthetic regularity of a nun's habit. I was familiar with ascetic though still hearing aesthetic. Standing still near river banks in the cold wind or atop hills and mountains, especially at noon when the sun is at its fiercest. I’m no stoic. I'm not making the bed, I'm pulling tight the corners of my mind.
*
My identity being one which makes me consider a thing growing inside me, things growing outside the body: green shoots or bindweed. Even if I never incubate a heart outside my own.
It is the same as how the poem can be understood by breathing next to it, a felt shape. Outside your window. The data could be registered as pain.
*
Sometimes it happens like it never has before. Concrete as a plastic doll. Not that gaping mouth in want (existing before us). Not bodies, but the particular instance of language only we could make. Secret syntax of intimacy. Nesting of profiles. Here we all are on our separate planes. But what would I do for a collision? What could I offer at the crossroads? What am I trading for? All I’ve wanted all my life is to be a part of a different economy. A geometric one without the sheen of heaven spilling light on a girl making shadows so large they become the weather. I make you a non-Euclidean magician, this room a mirror I look at each time I leave the house.
*
Outside we find courage the sky gives us. The habit to imagine bravely meeting those who have wronged us. It’s not like there’s a mimeographed copy of the branches’ reaching arms in my soul so much as I love you right now though I hadn’t been thinking of you. See how they make us shapely agents? In dead leaves shows through an image of paper doilies. You can’t net nostalgia but see it catch your eye. Autumnal valentine: thinleaf, oneseed, bigtooth, netleaf. Indigenous compounds strike a runnel through my heart. That saying them might be claim to a deeper root. My arcing, a vector that might carry me.
topographies II
I unfold myself along the horizon, a spreading uncontained by vision. Expansiveness and breath do not prevent the mirage from receding. The breaking of surface tension in land-locked regions of the mind or body. Outward snap of shook fresh linens. Dogs bark, bird songs, the horse wears a guard on its face to protect its eyes from flies. Its flicking tail, the same. Body as tool, body as transport. I wanted to be shorn over and over and over. In another town we were held in suspicion by the locals. Trying on new landscapes for size, temporarily perforating their understanding of the place they called home.
I have to turn a shape repeatedly to see what is before me, mobility being often circumscribed. The trick is in indirect light: each facet finding its frequency. The perceptible hum when it comes into its own. With a person the realization is deafening. Ears ringing for days. We name this love. Or fear.
*
As a child I liked the object that occasioned to find me. Puddles after the rain. Edges that require our attention. Objects that can be held, graciously or with fervor. How the shuttlecock’s nylon lacework distracted me from the movement of the game. How I loved the shape of matrices in math class but couldn’t see my way through them, couldn’t part a curtain. Certain I could lose myself, how many times did I step back? Or stand at the threshold, having no knowledge of sequences? Liminal spaces felt truest: between belief and unbelief, between girl and no longer girl. Not without but within: an unknown space, curvature of walls felt in darkness. What departs from us asks or demands. Growth and erasure. Molting our clothing. Underwear worn thin by pubic hair, I ask myself if I am becoming an architect.
*
You might call the wind unrelenting, but it felt softer on the whole. Turnips gone to seed. I took the bluffs to be a rising shoulder blade. The body seen through neighboring bodies. Curvatures you can rest in. We call it untouched only because we have not touched it, my friend reminds me. What the eye strips bare, what makes the eye see. Light reflected and absorbed. The iris determines how much to let in. Upon first viewing an O’Keefe painting, the pull into pistil, into crease, gravitate into darkest tint of pigment. Or unanchored eye on the horizon. The intimate made dominant, the monument made distant. A measureless encounter.
*
Other landscapes: auricle tunneling into labyrinth. Wind that fills your whole being, hurts your teeth. Into the center wherein I discover I am. Still, I fear the sound of a voice that has been given ear its whole life. How it threatens to tear the surface of this brocade I inexpertly weave. It sounds like a little boy. A bigger boy. The boy who says maybe these metaphors are so common because they are true. A handful of girls. A room full of men. One girl. Twelve men. I could make a metaphor to suggest predation. They are gentle men, we tell ourselves. We name this frequency rage to house it though we know it cannot be contained.
I saw that my girlness could hurt me, so I left some of it behind. At the front of the classroom, I attempt a bare canvas, keep my hum to inaudible frequencies. (This is not meant for human ears.) How often women tell each other they will be okay without certainty. How often we’ve said, I can catch the ball if you throw it to me with a surety. Look what happens when you turn it. Our whole lives.
Cassandra Eddington is a poet, teacher, and scholar from Utah. Her manuscript if the garden was a finalist in Kelsey Street Press’s 2017 FIRSTS! competition. Some poems can be found in La Vague, Word For/Word, Otoliths, and ditch. She develops curriculum and teaches for Colorado State University’s online creative writing minor. She will begin the PhD program in Creative Writing at University of Denver in Fall 2018. She finds and makes family wherever she goes. She is nobody’s mother.