Hera Lindsay Bird Read online

  Like two lonely scholars in the dark clefts of the Cyrillic alphabet.

  Like an ancient star slowly getting sucked into a black hole.

  So hard we break sports, leaving the conveners of the Olympics

  with a generous redundancy package.

  You are a denim tree and I’m the world’s fastest autumn.

  I am the Atlantic Fortress, and you are General Sherman

  taking me from behind.

  You stride into council chambers, waving a petition to orgasm.

  A lip of cloud brushes the roof of the barn.

  The pale trees curve around the eye and back into the brain.

  It’s like watching porn through a kaleidoscope

  or a slow wind in a kite factory.

  Like dogs trying to do it people-style, but failing due to the inflexibility of their anatomical structure.

  A cloud of bats float slowly up into your brain rafters.

  You roll down my stockings, like the sun peeling ocean from a Soviet globe.

  I want you in a seventeenth-century field, tilling the earth like flesh tractors.

  In the red shade of a mammoth

  in the Natural History Museum.

  In the airlock of a space station, my heart shaking like an epileptic star.

  Between the plastic sheets of a lobotomy table

  because writing poetry about fucking

  when you could be fucking

  is the last refuge of the stupid.

  It’s like getting three wishes and wishing for less wishes.

  It’s like designing a flag the exact same colour as the sky.

  It’s like crying over spilled milk before it’s out of the cow.

  It’s like breaking into a field at dawn

  and euthanising the cow so you can get your crying over and done with

  and immediately begin adjusting to your new lactose-free existence.

  But love isn’t really like killing cattle

  no matter what poetry wants us to believe.

  The day is a vault the sun has cracked open

  money flying everywhere like really expensive leaves

  and here I am begging you to come back

  as if you were already gone

  HAVING SEX IN A FIELD IN 2013

  Is the title of this poem, but it’s also a true story about being in love

  I am in love with you

  While one bird feeds another bird right next to me

  they throw their shadows into my life

  like black sugar

  I love to feel this bad because it reminds me of being human

  I love this life too

  Every day something new happens and I think

  so this is the way things are now

  I thought that as a stranger put his tongue between my legs

  in the first hour of the New Year

  and again as I woke

  to a field of slow blowing trees

  and right now telling you

  Friends, I love everything new

  even the first days of heartbreak

  when everything beautiful is set alight

  the glass fur of the cactus

  birds on fire with wonder

  I have done many things in my life

  I have talked to many people

  Some of these people have called me very drunk at one in the morning

  These people are my best friends

  They are like miles of snow to me

  When I listen to my voicemail

  I can hear one of them saying

  Did she just hang up on us

  IF YOU ARE AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PHARAOH

  I am carving dirty hieroglyphics

  into the wall of your tomb

  If you are a dead French aristocrat

  I am the suspicious circumstances

  surrounding your death

  If you are a shape-shifting wizard

  I am the shape you are shifting into

  If you are a fast-moving cloud

  I am an entire field of deer

  looking up

  If you are a sceptical cop

  I am a haunted fax machine

  If you are a catapult

  I am the medieval knight

  you are catapulting

  I fly over the dark fields of my enemies

  corkscrewing the dawn

  This is what missing you feels like

  Without you

  I am just the suspicious circumstances

  surrounding nothing

  Without you I am just

  a regular medieval knight

  settling ongoing tenancy disputes

  and doing other knight-related activities

  like dying thousands of years ago

  I rise from the grave to lean

  like an ancient wind against your house

  Your roof a red eyelid

  closed against the sky

  When I’m not with you I am like

  a lonely wrestler with nobody to break chairs on

  When you take off your clothes

  the whole room darkens to light you

  Your nakedness a pale kite

  I want to take you to the river that runs behind my house

  and show you where the dark water vanishes between the rocks

  but I can’t

  because nothing runs behind my house

  not even a lonely commercial highway

  I want to stand with you

  on the edge of a lonely commercial highway

  waiting for the jumper cables

  that will restart this engine

  and take us somewhere far beyond

  the confines of this poem

  I need to have a reason

  for the aisles of trees we sailed through

  and your hand on my knee in reckless disregard

  of road safety recommendations

  I need to have a reason

  for so many nights of watching you recede from me,

  like the ass end of a horse

  in the credits of a Western

  I need to have a reason

  for drinking beer in your parents’ swimming pool at night

  and how you lay face down in the water

  like a body in a celestial crime scene

  The stars so many knives

  in the small of your back

  HATE

  Some people are meant to be forgiven

  and others are meant to be hated forever ............................

  ....................................................................................................................

  I don’t think it’s right to hate people

  It’s just that I don’t care

  To wake each day in a snakeskin negligee

  and light myself on fire with such ethical behaviours

  Once ............................ I tried to give hate up

  But I was born to feel a great pettiness

  To lie face-down in my catholic schoolgirl outfit

  and pound the cobblestones of the Royal Albert Hall

  Hate is an old fashioned spirituality

  To know that pain will take care of itself

  It’s a lean justice that doesn’t serve anyone

  Only itself, like a long retired butler

  Well I don’t like life without a modicum of hate

  This was once a righteous indignation

  But now .......................................... it is a self pleasuring exercise

  A literary revenge is the most humiliating of all punishments

  To be stretched on the racks of the poetry industrial complex

  Hate only hurts the hater, says conventional wisdom

  But conventional wisdom’s dead and I am still alive

  If this hurts, it hurts like self-inflicted ass slaps

  Oh tell me I’m a bad girl, with a stunted empathy complex

  Some people are meant to hate forever<
br />
  and other people are meant to have appropriate reactions

  Some people believe in forgiveness

  and other people believe in .................... dwelling on things

  Hate is a rare emotion, because nobody dares feel it

  Nobody! ........................................................ at least not by name

  Everyone thinks their hate is just wrong behaviour objections

  But there are wrong behaviour objections and then there are

  .......................... wrong behaviour objections

  Hate is a white crêpe box, with voluminous spite ruffles

  It’s a friendly push off a Tuscan cliff

  Hate is a private joke, with only one punchline

  or a statue in the courtyard with a Bad Attitude

  To hate is to glory in bygone hurts

  Like an antique canon you never have to load

  My hate is a genial hate with ‘a modern-vintage aesthetic’

  like clocking someone with a non-stick frying pan

  As a child, my dance instructor once told me to stop rolling my eyes

  I was very petulant, and accustomed to lavish praise

  I’m not rolling my eyes, I said, I’m looking at the ceiling

  And I was ........................................................ with modern jazz contempt

  Hate is an emotional aristocracy fallen on hard times

  It’s like eating nothing off a solid gold plate

  To hate is a cruel vintage festivity

  Like a hand-made piñata filled with bees

  Hate is a luxurious futility, like a velvet birdbath

  Someone wise once said that, and that person was me

  And if you don’t like it .............................................................. well

  buy me a drink and you can finish the poem

  Once I tried to understand my enemy

  But some people it is less eyerolling not to understand

  To hate is a bad behaviour

  But I have to feel it anyway

  The more they want me less to hate them

  The more I smile like a sickle coming down

  & they’re the bad bad grass

  I tell my hate to my girlfriend and she laughs

  she laughs and laughs and laughs

  she laughs until she cries at the ungenerous things I say

  and then looks kind of worried ........................................................

  CHILDREN ARE THE ORGASM OF THE WORLD

  This morning on the bus there was a woman carrying a bag with inspirational sayings and positive affirmations which I was reading because I’m a fan of inspirational sayings and positive affirmations. I also like clothing that gives you advice. What’s better than the glittered baseball cap of a stranger telling you what to strive for? It’s like living in a world of therapists. The inspirational bag of the woman on the bus said a number of things like ‘live in the moment’ and ‘remember to breathe’ but it also said ‘children are the orgasm of the world’. Are children the orgasm of the world like orgasms are the orgasms of sex? Are children the orgasm of anything? Children are the orgasm of the world like hovercraft are the orgasm of the future or silence is the orgasm of the telephone, or shit is the orgasm of the lasagne. You could even say sheep are the orgasm of lonely pastures, which are the orgasm of modern farming practices which are the orgasm of the industrial revolution. And then I thought why not? I like comparing things to other things too. Like sometimes when we’re having sex and you look like a helicopter in a low-budget movie, disappearing behind a cloud to explode. Or an athlete winning a prestigious sporting tournament at the exact moment he realises his wife has been cheating on him. For the most part, orgasms are the orgasms of the world. Like slam-dunking a glass basketball. Or executing a perfect dive into a swimming pool full of oh my god. Or travelling into the past to forgive yourself and creating a time paradox so complex it forces all of human history to reboot, stranding you naked on some rocky outcrop, looking up at the sunset from a world so new looking up hasn’t even been invented yet.

  WILD GEESE BY MARY OLIVER

  BY HERA LINDSAY BIRD

  You do not have to be good

  is everything you deserve for taking

  relationship advice from a flock of migratory birds.

  Even in poetry I forgive you nothing

  not even your new empire of grief.

  You take off your dress and stand in the river

  your body a ghost on loan

  from someone else’s past.

  Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

  Meanwhile in a hospital gown

  Meanwhile in a long-dead language

  Meanwhile every morning, the stars in tatters on the snow

  Meanwhile the library of Alexandria burning in alphabetical order

  Meanwhile an asterisk blowing across the screen like tumbleweed

  Meanwhile in the lining of the uterine wall

  Meanwhile in hyperbole

  Meanwhile every day for the rest of our lives

  I return here to ask you how to forgive someone

  who was never mine to forgive.

  You do not have to be good

  Being good isn’t even the point anymore.

  I just don’t think it’s real

  to think of geese and feel so beautiful about yourself

  and so far away.

  Yesterday my girlfriend and I borrowed a car

  and drove down through the valley

  where my mother almost starved herself to death thirty years ago

  a huge silver wind blowing in from the sea.

  What do I care if there is no justice in this world?

  Life is hard

  and pain is hard

  and it’s hard for me to write plainly

  about the night my girlfriend told me she still loved you

  and call it art.

  It did not feel like art.

  It did not feel like a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

  It did not feel like a broken wheel backwards into the sea

  But it hurt me.

  It still hurts me

  Even now

  The shadow of new leaves trembling the carpet.

  Oh Mary

  How will we survive ourselves

  And will this life ever answer?

  I don’t know

  Panic and awe are the same to me.

  I love life

  and I hate death

  so when you try to describe to me

  what it feels like to want to die

  I can only look at you

  Like you are a slow-burning planet

  And I am pouring water through a telescope.

  You do not have to be good.

  You do not have to be anything.

  This is not an anthem for the world.

  This life is a hard life and

  It crushes people

  But it’s also weird and full of heat

  Crocodiles asleep in their red tent of hunger.

  Puzzle pieces blown up the street

  On the road outside the house

  We sold all our things and moved south for.

  It was winter and we were so in love

  Sitting on the floor of her grandmother’s flat

  watching the news roll in

  about the woman who had been chained

  for seven years in someone’s basement

  And just got free.

  The next morning we packed all our things

  and headed south.

  As if it were that easy.

  As if there were anywhere to arrive

  We could ever return from.

  BISEXUALITY

  ‘There’s such a thing as too much sexual freedom ....’

  Heidegger wrote that and he was bisexual too

  always naked on a black leash, scrubbing the telephone

&n
bsp; You think My heart is a shanty town ... with fur curtains blowing

  It’s like turning your back on God ........... but in a risqué halter neck

  Like a rocking horse at auction you go to the highest bidder

  You want to come home, but your home was destroyed in the war ....

  And carefully refurbished, with an elegant leopard trim

  The men are bad, and the girls ....................... are worse bad

  Each day you wake up and have to be the wife again

  To be a woman to a woman, is a female double-jointedness

  Your heart a black salt lick, in an elk-laden pasture

  To be bisexual is to be out of office, even to yourself

  Like a rare sexual Narnia and no spring in sight

  They won’t let you out of the closet to get back in again

  Deep in the winter coats, a little snow starts falling ...

  Everyone assumes you want to fuck them ......... and they’re right

  but you’re also bad girl, with a kinky .... goodbye fetish

  Always bursting into tears in the hotel lobby!

  Gliding off in a taxi, with a briefcase full of military secrets

  It’s hard to know what bisexuality means

  It just ....... comes over you, like an urban sandstorm

  When a fish crawls up onto land?—that’s bisexuality

  It’s an ancient sexual amphibiousness

  It’s like climbing out of a burning building into too much water

  Or climbing out of a burning building .......

  into a second identical burning building

  Why does everything have to be so on fire? you ask yourself

  But when you look down, your fretwork is smoking

  Not the well of loneliness, more like a water feature

  But a tasteful one, with a hidden power supply

  You look out over the hills and the rows of red houses

  And worst of all, you don’t even like softball!!!

  THE EX-GIRLFRIENDS ARE BACK

  FROM THE WILDERNESS

  The ex-girlfriends are back ...

  emerging once again from the tree shadows ...

  into the primordial burlesque of autumn

  with their low-cut ...

  reminiscences ... and soft, double ironies ...

  trembling once again into their

  opulent ...

  seasonal migration patterns

  a corsage of wilting apologies

  tethered to the bust ...

  The ex-girlfriends are back ... with their

  hand-beaded inconsistencies ...

  & various unhappy motives ...