Where Moderns Have No Myths
1.
The reproduction of the eye
incised beneath the rendering of lashes
Some days her face obliterates my own.
The elder as afterthought
flashes of our biological ruin.
Welcome to the end of the line.
The flowers are changed daily.
Photography is forbidden
but you may leave an offering.
Still there’s something to be said
for such high baroque entropy.
The walls have been hollowed
for your convenience.
Kindly note the exit nearest
what was last your body.
In order to emerge from a transaction
unharmed, simply withdraw the possession.
What remains after the end:
One sister is never enough.
2.
We missed the labor
of absorbing small wars.
Let’s be honest—
the weather helped.
Say you lived in Sarasota
because it sounds better.
All the old voices in tandem
Requiem for a wayward daughter
And all that banality,
thick as thieves who can’t
halt the slow curl of kudzu
over stolen cars.
3.
Habit is a dead gardener.
In the first place,
she’s slimmer now, peculiar
in the way of martyrs and other
unwelcome guests
those who revel in deceit and
the sleep of open houses
the inaudible patience of machinery
blindness in a room full of corners.
Votives and alabaster aside,
if there’s one thing I’ll never be
it’s sentimental.
Inflight Hospitality
‘The only thing that
can occupy a seat
(other than a Guest)
is a cello.’
The border arrives
in altitude
as an excess
of ascent or descent.
Beyond Wichita
grids trace threshing
patterned swirls from
tractors, an occasional
dappling of green
around the edges.
The Ghost beside me
is not a cellist.
Cloud Seeds
within this cumulus milieu
high spectacles unveil her
as supplicant
curling into cave gutters
her sleepshirt billows
toward covered bridges.
the suppression of hail
was once common in airports.
since we have undertaken
the seeding of clouds
there’s a perpetual saline rust.
it’s alright she says
iodide becomes her.
we’re all redheads now.
the celsius rebellion started here.
the weathermen meant no harm.
after the salt harvest
the toxicity of silver is approximated.
algal blooms induce
hanging weather: 39º
and humid with a slight breeze.
for swaying affect.
we bathe in siltwater
ignore the encumbrance of moss
or irrigated dresses.
we all know
(have been told)
beauty is thirst.
drifts of pollen follow
the reclamation of damages,
a flourish of voluntary dissolution.
listen:
where do the dead go?
past my raincoat
under her cul de sac
there are so many ways out.
Hunting with Dick Cheney
an elegy
The explosion that is my face
always was political.
I descend
wearing my dead
in brooches
of curling hair and ash.
Count the days he lay unfound
with my footsteps.
Is posthumous retrieval
anything other than semantic?
Antigone would know
the sanctity of a name.
The pretty suicide guide
says the beautiful ones
never destroy their faces.
I am sorry she did not know
you were such a lady.
© 2012 Lindsay Tuggle
from Contrappasso Magazine #1, August 2012
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ABOUT THE POET
LINDSAY TUGGLE’s poetry has been published in HEAT, commissioned by the Red Room Company, and included in various journals and anthologies in the US and Australia. In 2009, her poem “Anamnesis” was awarded second prize in the Val Vallis Award for Poetry. In 2012, she is the recipient of an Australian Academy of the Humanities Travelling Fellowship. Lindsay grew up in the Southern United States, and migrated to Australia eleven years ago. She now lives in Austinmer, where she is working on a book of elegies.
Contrappasso Magazine: International Writing 