Museum of Obsolescence
–Tracy K. Smith
Photo by Khashayar Kouchpeydeh on Unsplash
Museum of Obsolescence
–Tracy K. Smith
Photo by Khashayar Kouchpeydeh on Unsplash
Bee on a Sill
–Tracy K. Smith
Photo by Michael Milverton on Unsplash
Logos
–Tracy K. Smith
Photo by Chetan Kolte on Unsplash
El Mar
–Tracy K. SmithThere was a sea in my marriage.
And air. I sat in the middleIn a tiny house afloat
On night-colored waves.The current rolled in
From I don’t know where.We’d bob atop, drift
Gently out.I liked best
When there was nothingThat I could
Or could not see.But I know
There was more.A map drawn on a mirror.
Globe cinched in at the poles.Marriage is a rare game,
Its only verbs: amAnd are. I aged.
Sometime agoWe sailed past bottles,
The strangest signs inside:A toy rig. A halo of tears.
Rags like trapped doves.Why didn’t we stop?
Didn’t sirens sing our namesIn voices that begged with promise
And pity?
Photo by Matt Hardy on Unsplash
I Don’t Miss It
But sometimes I forget where I am,Imagine myself inside that life again.Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps,Or more likely colorless lightFiltering its way through shapeless cloud.And when I begin to believe I haven’t left,The rest comes back. Our couch. My smokeClimbing the walls while the hours fall.Straining against the noise of traffic, music,Anything alive, to catch your key in the door.And that scamper of feeling in my chest,As if the day, the night, wherever it isI am by then, has been only a whirOf something other than waiting.We hear so much about what love feels like.Right now, today, with the rain outside,And leaves that want as much as I do to believeIn May, in seasons that come when called,It’s impossible not to wantTo walk into the next room and let youRun your hands down the sides of my legs,Knowing perfectly well what they know.
The Everlasting Self
–Tracy K. SmithComes in from a downpour
Shaking water in every direction —
A collaborative condition:
Gathered, shed, spread, then
Forgotten, reabsorbed. Like love
From a lifetime ago, and mud
A dog has tracked across the floor.
Photo by Malcolm Lightbody on Unsplash
Ghazal
–Tracy K. SmithThe sky is a dry pitiless white. The wide rows stretch on into death.
Like famished birds, my hands strip each stalk of its stolen crop: our name.History is a ship forever setting sail. On either shore: mountains of men,
Oceans of bone, an engine whose teeth shred all that is not our name.Can you imagine what will sound from us, what we’ll rend and claim
When we find ourselves alone with all we’ve ever sought: our name?Or perhaps what we seek lives outside of speech, like a tribe of goats
On a mountain above a lake, whose hooves nick away at rock. Our nameIs blown from tree to tree, scattered by the breeze. Who am I to say what,
In that marriage, is lost? For all I know, the grass has caught our name.Having risen from moan to growl, growl to a hound’s low bray,
The voices catch. No priest, no sinner has yet been taught our name.Will it thunder up, the call of time? Or lie quiet as bedrock beneath
Our feet? Our name our name our name our fraught, fraught name.
Unrest in Baton Rouge
–Tracy K. Smith
after the photo by Jonathan BachmanOur bodies run with ink dark blood. Or else
It pools in the pavement’s seams.Is it strange to say love is a language
Few practice, but all, or near all speak?Even the men in black armor, the ones
Jangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they so buffered against, if not love’s blade
Sizing up the heart’s familiar meat?We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat.
Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.Love: naked almost in the everlasting street,
Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze
Image: Ieshia Evans stands before policemen in riot gear in Baton Rouge, LA July 9, 2016
( Jonathan Bachman for Reuters / Flickr )
The Museum of Obsolescence
–Tracy K. Smith
So much we once coveted. So much
That would have saved us, but lived,Instead, its own quick span, returning
To uselessness with the mute acquiescenceOf shed skin. It watches us watch it:
Our faulty eyes, our telltale heat, heartsTicking through our shirts. We’re here
To titter at gimcracks, the naïve tools,The replicas of replicas stacked like bricks.
There’s green money, and oil in drums.Pots of honey pilfered from a tomb. Books
Recounting the wars, maps of fizzled stars.In the south wing, there’s a small room
Where a living man sits on display. Ask,And he’ll describe the old beliefs. If you
Laugh, he’ll lower his head to his handsAnd sigh. When he dies, they’ll replace him
With a video looping on ad infinitum.Special installations come and go. “Love”
Was up for a season, followed by “Illness,”Concepts difficult to grasp. The last thing you see
(After a mirror—someone’s idea of a joke?)Is an image of an old planet taken from space.
Outside, vendors hawk t-shirts, three for eight.