34: éireann lorsung

éireann lorsung
poet

Éireann Lorsung grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she received her MFA in poetry in 2006. Her first book, Music for Landing Planes By, was published in 2007 by Milkweed Editions; a second, Projet Linguistique, is forthcoming in 2011. She continues to write and make prints while she completes her PhD in Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham (UK). Her website, where you can find information about her work and follow her on her weblog, is http://www.ohbara.com.

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17/42

The things that reddened: clematis,

mallow, bramble, a mulberry in the reserve.

Now the ghost bodies

of clematis everywhere

and whitening.

A station’s slatted front is half removed

for taller trains, the longboats dormant

in canals. Nothing came

into this century

unscathed. Tunnel face

like a castle and sheep still grazing by the weir.

To the east, your little town, nine poplars

in a line, greenhouse frames all emptied

of their glass, one hedgerow no one sees

to now. A sea that comes

like history, not by our bidding

and without cease.

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Rugby to Tamworth

September, the greenery falling all in on itself

Full of apples

now feral now the last exit of a nightclub

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What are all these crosses drawn on wood

A wild holly …….garden grown to ruin

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This careless house ………these centuries of good breeding

Plots which will breathe underwater

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Roads the Romans made and roads our hands made

Across these bodies …….and bodies we don’t even know

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What beautiful thing did I not find

Was I not willing to find ………….. here.

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The moon over Magritte’s landscape

Whoever said it should be early evening, or the sky, uncrowded
at this point with stars, should be the perfect

blue one poet thought of when he wrote about a Summer’s
Day, or that the moon, inconspicuously dangling

in the lower-right quadrant of the top-left pane
should be blurred by mist to nacre, pink-tinged

where finally one single star shines—they were right,
like the light coming on in the house next door and the woman

upstairs pulling her full slip over her head in slow-motion are
right, you know—like the silhouettes of trees floating in the garden.

Dear painter, the little lights in the garden and the stars and the half
moon moving left to right across my window’s page make a place

for the hat you wear (the one I like), and your stained
hands, and your wife, and your dog, like the space

in the sky you made for doves, unruly torsos, birdcages and bodies
of analysts, the dark room we wandered into, finding a blue

our hands were hardly big enough to carry. In your city
every man wears an apple and the women stare like umbrellas.

I have been wandering all day and barely touched you, immense
as the moon, and also shining, pale, somehow like me but at a remove.

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Lille

Everything real—

the Cathedral in Lille

our footsteps,

striped tents, long skirts,

gold teeth, feet, hands

full of apples,

the stained

glass picture of our lives in trains,

airplanes, emptying rooms—

One year we will grow tomato plants

in coffee cans, beans

between paper and the cool

clear sides of jars—

nothing to riot.

There being nothing

to promise, I only

save

all my ribbons for thee.

Leave the madonnas and saints where they are.

The ornate world, all its things.

Stone floors, wooden floors.

And your hands on the table

alternate with mine.

The place I imagine for myself is the space

between your hands.

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on the nightstand…

• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
• Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
• a book of Kafka’s love letters
• So Many Ways to Begin by Jon McGregor
• a small wooden lamp
  

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am loving..

• the Amélie soundtrack (as always…I come back to it over
  and over and find it fresh every time)
• the feeling of winter ending
• working in the sun
• WJT Mitchell’s writing
• my teaching
• new manuscripts I’m working on
• making lists of all my projects
• passion fruit
• tulips

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what inspires you about the spring?

More light, the freshness of everything, flowers, more light, more light, more light.

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what three poems do you revisit over and over?

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (T.S. Eliot), the book-length poem This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, by Juliana Spahr, and “i thank you god” by e.e. cummings.

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what’s your idea of the perfect spring picnic?

Let’s go somewhere on our old roadbikes, a bottle of cloudy lemonade and a couple of ploughman’s sandwiches, some strawberries, a guitar, and some books. Make sure it’s about 11 a.m. when we leave, and make sure you don’t have any plans the rest of the day…

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what are three constants in your day?

• tea
• poetry
• photographs