Carolyn Srygley-Moore: Two Poems

Casting Out | The Whistler's Tarantula

Casting Out

                              Heydrich: Hitler was your lodestar: inventor of
The final solution
                                        You’d depart
                         Your blue-eyed house
           Like a common salesman each morning, kissing
                                        Your children first.
       The last time, assassinated (but we could not name you victim).

           Even you hoped your creation would be
              Your salvation; thought
                            Changing the lines of the world
Was facile as crossing uncrossing the legs.

                   Not thinking, however, that even a murderer must be transparent
                                        In order to comprehend.

                              Some nights I hang out in the deathtrap of
                   Your body, tossing a coin
                              In the pelvic cup, rattling
                        A pencil along your ribs. I am simply an artifact
                   In your death as I would have been
                              In your life, a mad woman.
           Transported, gassed at the camps.

                         I find, tucked in your cranial sockets, a love letter
                               So yellowed now it could melt away,
                                                     Run through
                                       The downspout with common rain.

Yet who would love you?

                         Full consciousness is fierce and dark, unmeasured
                                  Space from which the lodestar
                        Shimmies. And consciousness is cavernous
                                            As history
                           Casting out the demons of the past
                                            Into you, you
                                      Who are still sleeping.

The Whistler's Tarantula

Stranded at the pinnacle of the carnival ride, the wind
lecherous as the sandman. The lake is the flat oval of
            a doll’s shadow, almost meiotic. In the water,
something flowers, the face of the drowned. You ask
what is
                        the birth of music? Wet your fingers,
I say, rub the lip of the soda bottle, whistle into the hollow:
the stolen violin will erupt.

Thus the living ripens in the vineyard. Light is a blade.
A faceless someone is courier
            of sheet music, a wedding duet: neither bride
nor groom can whistle on key. Check the harmonica.
Any astrologer can tell you, the stars
                        are fixed — there’s nothing the human
can do about it. Everything has happened, yet we
cannot recall the other’s name.

Chill of daybreak, a red star ripens among the lichen.
Turn the stone. The preparers
            forgot to ribbon the trellis, the orchids withered
before we began the vows. Our future, midwifed,
had a caesarian section then
                        healed, quickly, like water. The catgut
stitches dissolved, there was simply a scar to kiss,
a carnival game — trying on faces — to endure.

In this particular light, a sliver of sunset that could break
glass, the tarantula appears bald
            as a wig. He grows hirsute in the red flower
pot, then, all by itself, the arachnid could startle
a monster. O above it all, you
                        were once a sweet sweet man, now a
temper disembodied, bruising the whistler’s mannequin.

Poet's Biography:

Carolyn Srygley-Moore is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University's Writing Seminars, where she won awards for her poetry. She has been published by The Antioch Review, The Pennsylvania Review, and other journals. She currently resides in upstate New York with her husband and daughter.