I picked up this book of poetry by Alessandra Lynch two summers ago on a whim, browsing through bookstore racks in Hanover, New Hampshire for something to marvel at.  I do not regret my decision.  Turns out she’s pretty awesome.

Lynch’s poems are like sparks that ignite some part of nature—its memories, colors, abstractions.  There is something very odd and rare about these poems, something I can’t always grasp before it floats away and lingers somewhere just out of reach, leaving behind it a parade of images.  At times it’s a bit of a tease, but I like that sometimes.

Here’s a taste—a few of my favorites.

_________

Birthday

Some of the wishes were scared of the dark and pink
and blue and the planet at large.

Some had tender feet, slightly barbed
by paper clips and wire,
picked guitars and a violin’s absent string,
lost parades of forks and knives.

So they winged it,
away from ribbons and balloons, spinning
into the sky
like maple-leaf copters,
like bright little wing-bones of ants,
while the candles they’d abandoned sputtered and sank,
and the ghostly flames staggered, flagged
and paused in the wake:

Upon a bucket of rose-skulls
Upon the moon’s lonely talon
Upon the dying man tugged back to life
Upon the dead man strolling into the room
Upon a silver-horned bicycle and a whirring hat
Upon a bell for a dove
Upon the end of fog         the sage fields rising
Upon the hook-winged crow wheeling its blackness
Upon city-smoke confounded by the clarity of twig and feather
Upon yellow ribbon         against yellow stars

The wishes were not all sublime—some cantankerous—
dirty and grim, sad, and many sweeping by
lost from the original mouth and mind
that hoisted them into the air.

For years I stood watching them while behind me
my house burned and my land and the forests beyond.

_________

A Letter.  Like Blazing.

When I rose from the ditch
I left a swift petal
in lieu of presence

& found you in a slink of otter-
damp river, wearing the secret
hinge of a smile

& when you unbuttoned
the stars from navy

midnight & wind fell
cold out of velvet & my
stilled door blew open

& when your hard gold
hook swerved & pressed, the twilight

thistles by my river stiffened
& thrust into the sky that had been hurting

all morning for your purple voice, flecked, glittering

& when we swung through, pirating our private eye-
patched afternoon, the local bees shimmered in their grove with what blazed

between your hips & mine:
maple & pine-tar
& the terrible knowing of going not gone.

_________

Icicles

Those brothers banged them till they fissured,
fell to snow.  They used sticks or bats
or stones.  Sometimes missed.  Sometimes split
the glimmering to a shatter, a cough
of electric dust—the burning stickled
their skins.  Those brothers said nothing
was good about them—they damaged the eaves
and dragged the house down—said they were
a poor excuse for rain or any form
of weeping, streaking through their freeze.
But I longed for them to stay, longed
for their elegance to last,
the tiny silver cities and gold
sea illuminating their edges,
the slender bodies hanging
impeccably from the eaves, barely
hanging from anything.  They were miracles,
their points dissolving in the smoldering
grip of a hand that could
end it all.  Any hand.

_________

Piece by Piece He Went
for Bill

First, his blue toe.
Then, his calf up to the hipbone.
He thinned to a frame.

Fireflies faltered, lit into
his bony lattice, the fretted ribs, mating
between collarbone and pelvis

till the whole leg fell off and inside
he was all air and brightness and treefrogs—

(bluethroated crickets struggled through his beard,
a meadow rose from the cave of his stomach)

—we tried to catch their tender bodies,
their thrumming hearts
that longed to be let back

into the wild yellow grass—no matter how
rotten with dew, no matter how
darkened by rain, no matter.

_________

In the Yard,

I am raking through stars—
Their faces, damp and yellow,
won’t pick up.

I smell their tail-smoke
in the red oak, singed.
Its soft, tarnished arms
bothered by wind.

It was how many
pinned?  How many stiffly
shot to harrowed dirt, blackly
pitting the earth?

In the pale aftermath,
the rain could not
tap music
into them.  The moon could not
calculate, but dimly faced

the fading scarlet outcasts
in skinflint hats,
those wetted and gassed.

Low on the branch, low
on the rack, a few
freezing notices,

colorless maps—
not stars, not leaves—we rake
through—we hang back.

_________

On Balloons That Have Hissed Out

We were having a picnic when we found them.

Like abandoned petals
(pale magnolia choked and flushed, bursting in flustered bloom)
(dogwood petal unpacked from the dark trunk, freed from its floating
act to a yellow blister)
—one a silky blue ear
wilting on the hot-top tar
—one a cut-up cloud
that gave its last white gasp
—one a purple scab softened and bloated
by rain, peeled from its original skin.

These pieces were want-to-be sails
with their tiny muster—now
grounded after such short drifts of purposelessness
wherein they’d pressed up
the air, swell-headed and empirical—nodding
to the elms and helicopters and awnings and swings.

Remember all the air that put them there?
Remember the helium years
that filled their heads to a colorful bouquet
tossed up like giant roses and oversized carnations
at the matador-sky’s cloaked face
at the ballerina-cloud’s waxy poise
at the president of wind that must deadhead
anything thrown, any ecstatically flung thing
bloom or balloon or bomb—

dull shreds
in disarray on the dirt—
how modest their hiss
when all the air fled.

_________

Hope you all are having a magical weekend.