Poppies, and Roads

Abstract

Poppies, and Roads Dana Jaye Cadman (bio) Poppies It seems there will be lifeafter you. A morning.Night doesn't stop the sunfrom his urge to lift upand end her. The moon,however, is coerced out of flood. Water chamber.Paper skin, the blisterremembers and scars.When you left, I swalloweda planet in the shape of a pearand kept it in my chest to growand green. Each sleepit ripened with the swellof my breath. Tropicof Cancer. The rain happenson the window slow, in small, repeatingdeaths. When Springcame, the ether morningopened motion on me.Dew. I have knownthe diadem of stars [End Page 128] the Diviner keeps at home.I was the girlwho braided grass blades,making crownsin the lawn. I knew youwhen you were still a small boy. Kingof copper wireand cigarettes andbroken things. But don't we grow. I knowhow the buck turnsfrom a fawn. Monarch of weeds.Laurels of wilt. The crescentsheds its antler selfto become nothing at all. I know the sunriseand I know the facts.The branches of each lungand capillary of the heartbend like wheatgraingiving to a breeze. The seasons in usthat the cancer relieves.Sweet half moonshows only half her heart,an onion bulb underneath. Your plant-flesh leansits rays to heat: a bent neckfor your disease.You do not go, old Cobalt. The Empress keeps dressedin her pomegranate robes.The wild engine ofyour body remainson and on. No, you stayand I will go. Blues moan and sing it:Enough of this. Thisapocalypse, this exorcismdawn. This undone [End Page 129] tulip, cracked/what moves along.What moves insideof me. What stops. The rest of the moonis gold and its topcut off. [End Page 130] Roads The goldfish from the street festival died in three daysand the neighbors backed over their catby accident, even though the SUV was shiny and newPerhaps the driveway felt like it was lifting up It seems fate is something of a computer, something of a godstuck over debris I think there are special wheelsfor this sort of problem I think of the streetlightsthey are asking, come to me There's cement in my mouth beginning to dry and I'mdriving deep into the sinking pattern of thingsI think for deer's horns there is climbing and for God,who is nowhere, I make gestures downward instead I ask the wheel for everything I want and it comes to meall of it comes and always more desirelike it fell onto the highway writhingThat is what the poem is, or must be Old wonder leaning over its own mechanical afterlifeand wanting exquisitely to bend into an oiled ghostthere's no sense in logic, where there are equationsthere's no space for that I think every poem must be desperate from now on or fallingor I won't be saved at all, or it's all arbitrary isn't itwhich sleeps become nightmares and which are thebeautiful animals we meet in the woods [End Page 131] Dana Jaye Cadman Dana Jaye Cadman is a writer and artist. Her poetry has recently appeared in North American Review and the Literary Review. She is currently working as libretto illustrator for the upcoming opera Sensorium Ex. She lives just past the edge of New York City, where she teaches writing. Copyright © 2019 Middlebury College Publications