Amy Debrecht

Poetry
by
Amy Debrecht

Desire & Company

Desire has entered my house 
and brought its entourage: 
obsession, aching, compulsion. 
They each expect separate rooms. 
They think of nothing 
but how they feel, what they want, 
which has become what they need. 
They hear every sigh from other rooms 
(they don't listen to sense, 
only sound), and they say each leaf 
is touched differently by the sun.
Preoccupied and peevish 
to the supremest degree, they tire easily: 
want without receipt is wearisome.
Mornings for them are long 
and dreamy, sprawled in large beds, 
the down musty and sumptuous, 
books of poetry under the pillows. 
God forbid they catch a glimpse 
of themselves in the mirror-
it's enough to set them practicing 
their parted and pouty lips, their heavy lids, 
looking away and back again. 
Afternoons, they're in the pool, 
every movement to attract: 
shoulders and eyes work 
each deliberate gesture. 
They sit in the lawn chairs 
and say, "Languid, I'm simply languid." 
Evenings, a few glasses of red wine-
mostly a prop, something to admire 
in the candlelight, the liquid rolling 
like fire in the glass. 
Then the lamps burn all night, 
they don't sleep, but pace 
and smoke and call out for me-
they're in forever agony. 
I attend to them 
and to no other guest. 
And when they leave, 
how empty the halls.
 
 

Down with Spring

Why speak?  What is there to say of beauty?
The spring world needs us not-just look
at the azaleas, how dare they be so bright!

The grasses overnight are green, green, green.
The dogwood that turned suddenly white
on Saturday now blushes pink,

and already the petals drift into soft snow banks
under the pretty boughs. 
The magnolia's tongue-blooms

lap at the new breezes.  Are we ready?
The robins are back.  Just yesterday
one sang in the oak outside the window-

we must make room for them and their songs.
The cold belonged to us-we and the black trees
alone rose from the white grounds.

In winter we made our marks: our prints, 
our breath, our blades.  Now there is only mud
in which to stamp our soles.  Spring

leaves us behind, we whose blooming
is often shoddy, poiseless, timed 
by our own internal moments.  Everyone 

is awake now.  And what will we have to say?
Only warnings: winter will come
soon enough, you flowers, you boughs, you birds!
 
 

Each night, love,

your voice comes to me
through thin channels,
rests in my hand and in my ear
a small traveling body,
quiet, but unweary, low
but no whisper.
Each night, this is what
I have of you, this
disembodied, expressive you,
alive and miles away.
Each night we must pause
for the train 
that whistles and chugs
its warning and way
down a narrow track,
whose root and end
you can only trust
are known to someone.
Each night the conductor 
sounds the horn:
Lovers and children,
dogs and drifters,
stand back, off the track!
And this long body hurtles
through the night unseen,
with a song
in its rusty windpipe,
a promise
to arrive by morning
with the goods,
the precious goods.
 
 

The Eaters and the Eaten

By mid afternoon, the half-melon rotting on the back step
reveals a lacework of endless sweet caves, teeming 
with bees, ants, gnats, and flies.  They destroy 
the world as they go, blind and consuming as a fire.

What is this instinct?  A devotion to the flesh, a shared 
singular vision larger than any brood or hive.
Some sticky voice that calls to them-a siren, a whisper, a song old
as the first crop of their ancestors. Or perhaps there is no listening,

only movement forward and deeper.  Does the melon strangely crave 
the dizzy sick faint of her own slow devouring-
the swoon that grows as she disappears into the mouths of these furies? 
Is she a maiden giving up her throat to the vampire's fangs 

in a surrender, terrifying and sweet?  Does she continue to feel 
even as her flesh is unraveled-that phantom pang, 
the body's denial of the thing missing?  In the stillness that settles 
after any devastation, the eaters fall off the rind, reeling 

from this symbiosis, fly crooked circles home to sleep 
a dreamless sleep, no memory of the feast.  The rind spins down 
like a hubcap in a quiet street in the wake of thieves.
 
 

My Mother at the Window

I drive away from my mother's house in fall,
late in the season, when dark settles early 
and the last of her oak leaves fall to earth. 

My car is piled high with things she always 
sends me away with:  sweets, clean laundry, 
mail that keeps arriving for me at her address.

She runs to the window to wave to me
and I am glad she remembered.

When she leaves me, will this be my last image of her-

parting the long curtain at the window, 
her body all shadow and golden lamplight, 
happy to see me returning to the world?

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