Tyler Mills
Holy
The nurses have left work. The pilots have left work.
The blank blue caelum covers us, as the split
pull of cloth. I’ve returned to a city of men
with names scrawled in ink across the throat.
Somewhere, you are hooked up to a machine. The monitor
hides your face, becomes it, black frame and flickering glass.
You sit at the head of the table in our sunroom.
I reach across my mother and touch your arm.
I kiss an area of the cold plastic
where your cheek would be, and blood
vessels prickle purple, below, at your neck.
You are tilting your head—I swear.
This is my dream. We drink tea. They paint
the station walls white for us.
Oath Detailed into a Landscape with a Crow-Quill Pen
It’s as though I’ve put another voice into a cache
of mango leaves in an animal’s stomach to starve
out the urine that makes the lily
yellow orbing a center ten times more blinding
than the sun. After it was unhooked from a chain
& after the hinge closed the two hemispheres,
one man without a shirt who we would call
a boy drove a vehicle carrying what looks like a balloon
compressing the metal pit inside of it. How the pilots
signed it like a cast and wrote their wishes on its charged curve,
even the fins. In one argument about a figure
stopped in time, a woman is rubbed into a silhouette—
charcoal, corseted into her board of a torso. But this is a study
for a painting. What about the ladder
of a strap, the silk textile tattooed into the blood
pattern running over her back? I have taken her,
though she turned away, closing her eyes, thinking
she gave her exposed self to a doctor
instead of the blink it takes a lens to collect the light
reflecting off her skin. Because of the crows
fighting on the roof of my apartment
in a city in the United States
directly above my dumpster in the alley
I’m promising this with an ink that has an idea of a crow in it—
the way an idea of history is a diagram
of a promise of a room
where the windows keep shifting positions.
Even these crows mark the tile with their black current
feathers: above me, military jets
cross the high clouds for air shows
as they do once a year. Let the dew point be my witness
that I do not know what this means: to look at things
like prints of fruit crate art where there is a griffin
guarding three oranges
and decide why a griffin is guarding three oranges,
its lion tail curled into an almost O. As the gray
pipe of the security camera secured to the corner of the building
is my witness, I will never be able to do anything else
but give you a photo of your own shadow
stretched out over the ground. The shadow is an airplane
low over a road that converges with another road,
splits two fields, then opens up to a town
dotting a shoreline with peaked roofs.
I only have a copy of this body
diving over a line that extends to the sea, the city
grainy as a silverpoint drawing—the oldest
way to draw a pen across a surface--
putting metal to the page:
glue mixed with ground bone.
The Muse Appears with a Moon Rock and a Tuning Fork
Me me me me. I’ve already written myself
out the car door. I’d been driving through a night
forest: pines, maples, anxious boxes of houses.
I called my father. I was lost. He said, turn
around, and there I was, at the side of the road,
the plants shaped like hands. Bon chance. Strange
I can talk to you like this. I meant to leave
by Amtrak for New York with a red suitcase,
the zippered cloth edged with leather
shutting inside my white breath: but I woke
to ice erasing the sidewalk in a long smear. Sugar.
My lungs rustle like Mylar balloons. See,
I’m myself, written awake, in socks, cross-legged
on your bed, wondering about something...how I failed
you because I lost you in celluloid
fields quiet with soldiers, in Dr. Zhivago.
The sun will set, the clouds mottled with ink
numbers of what we owe. So, rub my
table with a rag. I can’t talk to you
like this, like I left you in Paris, where a painter
is warming her hands over a bowl of boiled water.
--
Tyler Mills is the author of Tongue Lyre (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013), which won the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems have received awards from the Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, and Third Coast and have appeared in AGNI, Best New Poets, e Antioch Review, Georgia Review, TriQuarterly Online, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Maryland (MFA, poetry), Tyler Mills is currently a PhD candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago.