From Her Tulip Bower Tommelise Writes the Swallow

Abstract

From Her Tulip Bower Tommelise Writes the Swallow Carolyn Oliver (bio) Dear Swallow, how is a hollow mended?The gilded wings he pledged were barely flossenough to lift a raindrop’s song. He fed me windand bone. Starved, I learned to swim. Dear Swallow, seems every sailor I met carriedyour shadow on his skin. For my daily breadI mapped your curves, my thighs corbiculaea-rasp with pollen. Honey I couldn’t send. Dear Swallow, the moth tendered me a morsel,her only night. Ravenous, I dreamt your clawsgone manacle. At dawn, soft scales paintedmy bare wrists. No key in any of her eyes. Dear Swallow, in my roofless room I lierestless, fastened to rumor. How swift you’vebecome, tearing through the small hours.How immaculate your feasts. How your silence swallows me. —I believed your elegance a net.I believed you wanted eggs red as meator blue as sleep. I believed I knewwhat leaving meant. Swallow. [End Page 81] Dear glutton. Dear banquet. Dear grace.This bower’s for breaking.Your hunger waits. [End Page 82] Carolyn Oliver CAROLYN OLIVER is the author of Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press 2022), which won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in three chapbooks and in The Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, Smartish Pace, Shenandoah, Beloit Poetry Journal, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, Cherry Tree, Plume, DIALOGIST, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Massachusetts. When I return to the fairy tales and myths I knew as a child, I tend to focus—and this is likely linked to the time I spent closeted—on the work of revelation and concealment. Who might be hiding at the story’s periphery? Whose outward openness is a mask? Who needs a lift to another time or place to give a fuller accounting of desire, danger, agency? Copyright © 2023 Wayne State University Press