I go to sleep and wake up
different. You make a lengthy
drive across Iowa to find
the other end of Iowa, its fields
hung silent in iron sky. Claims
are always being made
about precision. If I were a bird
I would mean to be
the small kind. What is going on
in that room where
no one lives? It might fill
itself with delicate things,
some very nice iron bowls,
twelve miniature trees all
of them aflame. Listen,
Cody. How many times
did they tell you
you'd never make it? One day
is never longer than
the next untangling film
from a canister. Somebody
means to measure you
by needle and light.
I take a quiet kind
of panic to the river.
Auditorium Poem
That the stars pull a wave toward
other coasts. That wolves are something
else until you meet one
in his own room. What was that story
about transgression? Wolves that lick
their gums and smile. Those same
stars I do not understand. The cold
has left me in it and the plants
dead holding each other in the back seat
of a car. I didn't mean it. Sometimes
you have no choice but to drive
to Connecticut. I know my hands fold
on their own. I know falling
to my knees still means something.
That a basin of cool water still answers
the moon. Here you are. Here
you always have been.
_______________________________________
Wendy Xu is the author of the chapbook THE HERO POEMS (H_NGM_N BKS 2011). Selected by D.A. Powell as the winner of the 2011 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, her work has appeared, or is forthcoming in CutBank, Drunken Boat, The American Poetry Journal, MAKE, ANTI-, InDigest, Loaded Bicycle, and elsewhere. She currently co-edits iO: A Journal of New American Poetry, curates the collaborative book-review project READ THIS AWESOME BOOK, and lives in Northampton.
