Category: Cecily Parks

by Cecily Parks

All night foxes ranged over the snow crust

barking raggedly. This morning

a warm rain softens the snow and dumbly

I watch my love sweep it off the windshield

and drive away. I’m in the road in little more

than underwear, suspended in the edgy bliss

of exhaust with two flights of stairs to climb.

In dens nearby the coiled foxes lick

their teeth and cover their eyes

with bushy, white-tipped tails. When I go

inside, my bare feet leave curved wet-marks

on the stairway’s metal treads. A fox

will arc along a wall knowing the stone

won’t hold her scent. When a fox runs in leaves

her sound is a rustle of leaves. No one is looking

or listening for me. Nearby a bell hits its notes.

Which version of heaven will feed me

until my love comes home? In one, I understand

what the foxes say. In the other, the foxes

find what they want and are quiet with it.

from O’NightsFind more by Cecily Parks at the library

Copyright © 2015 Cecily Parks
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Cecily Parks

If I,—

when you are

sleeping

and the landlady downstairs

her ashy dog

are sleeping

and the train that brought me home

is a wolf-black breath

breathing back

into coarse marshlands

along the coast,—

if I in our dining room

dressless

dance, wheezily

singing so not even

our infestation of moths

can hear: I will never be daughter

of the maple tree! I will never be

sister of the leaf!

If I admire

my hairless shins

and the purple gloss

of my polished fingernails running

over them in the light

cast by the street’s mechanical

moon,—who shall say I am not

the woman

who says with her mouth

at your neck:

Love, when I told you

my wilderness was almost

wild, it meant

I hadn’t loved a man

like a man yet.

from O’NightsFind more by Cecily Parks at the library

Copyright © 2015 Cecily Parks
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Cecily Parks

I run with my mouth open. I open my mouth to breathe

into yours. On a whim

the Queen Anne’s lace offers the roadside a galaxy.

I run. You take care of my breath.

You take care of it again.

Is this trust

or a consequence of summer’s washes and concoctions?

Like one admonished for not darkening enough

of my nights, I ask further into the inflorescent

quiet. Once a woods, always a woods.

Sheet of mist on the unmade bed.

The sky begins at my mouth: star, moon, meteoric truck.

I find the wind. You find my west.

The contours of the pasture

repeat the contours of animals who wake

in the promise of grass.

I love exhaustion. I love it again.

from O’NightsFind more by Cecily Parks at the library

Copyright © 2015 Cecily Parks
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Cecily Parks

At this old desk of orange wood striated by dark wavy lines, I think

of electrocardiograms, heartbeats shimmying under my palms in a

white room in winter. A window to my right, gray sky, twitchy bare

branches. In the green of summer, a window full of maple leaves, I

liked to think that I lived in a tree. Now hot water circulates to the

silver radiator, knocks and wetly hisses. A painting hangs above the

desk, to the left. To look at it, I lift and turn my head so my chin is

over my heart. The radiator knocks. In the painting, a girl in a white

dress followed by a white dog walks beside a pond. The dog is in

mid-stride, one front paw a pendulum. Where I live, there is a pond

where the bankside winter grasses seethe in the wind as I run past

them. A red screech owl with a heart-shaped face and white-flecked

wings lives in a tree there. The owl’s feathers match the pattern of

tree bark. The owl can resemble a broken branch, its call a whinny

or trill. I’ve never seen it. I’ve seen the elderly bird watchers at dusk,

whispering, the black wings of their binoculars over their hearts.

from O’NightsFind more by Cecily Parks at the library

Copyright © 2015 Cecily Parks
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Cecily Parks

Accept the window

that gives you glass, the dawn

that gives you the maple branch

with a single bud, meadowlarks

singing where you can’t see them.

Keep your black nightgown on,

more night than gown.

Wolves in the wallpaper.

Read an article about a man

who coughed blood. If you don’t learn

who lives next door to you, you

can leave the curtains open

all the time. Only at certain times

can a body be sexual. The doe

that meets your gaze in the meadow

isn’t sexual. When surgeons split

the coughing man’s chest with a saw

and then his lung with a scalpel,

his body wasn’t sexual.

At night the moon pulls

leaf buds out of the branch with silver

instruments. If you don’t learn

how many bodies the doctor

places his fingers into

in a single day, yours will always

be the only. Inside

the coughing man’s lung, the surgeons

found a fir tree. The dark interior

of a lung or a leaf bud, imagined

long enough, becomes a wilderness.

Your mind can do this

in the morning when you don’t have

a body. Wilderness isn’t paradise.

from O’NightsFind more by Cecily Parks at the library

Copyright © 2015 Cecily Parks
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.