哀 / Sad
From West: A Translation (Copper Canyon Press, 2023) by Paisley Rekdal. Copyright © 2023 by Paisley Rekdal. Used with the permission of the publisher.
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Bats
unveil themselves in dark. They hang, each a jagged, silken sleeve, from moonlit rafters bright as polished knives. They swim the muddled air and keen like supersonic babies, the sound we imagine empty wombs might make in women who can’t fill them up. A clasp, a scratch, a sigh. They drink fruit dry. And wheel, against feverish light flung hard upon their faces, in circles that nauseate. Imagine one at breast or neck, Patterning a name in driblets of iodine that spatter your skin stars. They flutter, shake like mystics. They materialize.
2007
Once
white field. And the dog
dashing past me
into the blank,
toward the nothing.
Or:
not running anymore but
this idea of him, still
in his gold
fur, being
2019
Vessels
Shouldn’t it ache, this slit
into the sweet
and salt mix of waters
composing the mussel,
its labial meats
winged open: yellow-
fleshed, black and gray
around the tough
adductor? It hurts
to imagine it, regardless
of the harvester’s
denials, swiveling
his knife to make
the incision: one
dull cyst nicked
from the oyster’s
mantle—its thread of red
gland no bigger
than a seed
of trout roe—pressed
inside this mussel’s
tendered flesh.
Both hosts eased
open with a knife
2016