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2020 Academy of American Poets Prize

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Anniversary

                              For M.

by Michael M. Weinstein
Do June again, for you have not gotten it quite. What a passionless substance this absence is, colors summer in as if by number: lemonade, trampledgrass, smalt—which is a deep & nearly unforgivable blue. As it latens it dawdles, collects all that’s abandoned, the sunlight does. An o’clock / an ochre filter. The fossilized playground structures’ rusty spines. What extinct species of verb were once mine? Run, jump, climb. Up the hot metal bend of the slide. Shiny violence, this wistfulness—wants to put flesh on the bones of it: feathers, scales, fingernails. To see in the ginkgo tree’s stinking seeds what the world was. A substance, yet passionless. Not wanting anything but to be truly without us, for a branch tip to shoot out a leaf— thus may each pollen cone release its impeccable sporophylls, as it has always done—and go on doing & doing that. June was all strung up, like the ghostly diaphanous slips on the fire escape at dusk—the undershirt barely swaying like a rabbi praying in his sleep, so sheer you saw the moon sweat through, the dark all round—on our hopes for it. A maculate summer night far from the center, real far, almost close to the airport, sprawl of vacant lots & used car dealerships is what we got.

An o’clock like the other o’clocks. Except we had thought I could walk. Pale prince in a kingdom of silverware I became that night, that summer, sat up coloring the window: dark & dark & dark, a deep substance,  passionless. Swallowing none of the vast sweep of feeling feasting on the joists of my half-life, June just went on polishing the horizon like a knife—a lost continent’s edge, Ability—agleam & neatly placed back into the velvet drawer of night. & maybe the trees, too—so black we  can’t see them now—believed they’d been promised a different arrangement, not to kneel still as penitents until the sky lucidly, scrupulously drops its breathless dioxides. We had dreamed July temperate: all ice cream & iridescence, even mosquitoes’ tinselflickering wings at our elbows expected, somehow correct. But the fact  a plastic sac of powdered-freezedried-then-diluted monoclonal antibodies stolen from a mouse now drips down into the roots of me— that this substance, passionless, attacks every cell with its runoff of chemical snow— feels like an outside joke. A laughter / a slaughter. Like how I was somebody’s daughter. How once we watched each other put on a dress with a terrible earnestness& nothing anywhere breathing. I was a mummy back then: someone had painted a code on my body, a face on my face, someone crushed spices into my absences, someone rinsed my insides with palm wine, & I lay waiting to disappear, or change. You took the name I gave you, and the thought that you carry it  over the fields of your whole time on earth cuts into me like that post-IV ache in the vein, won’t go away. How to come back from that. How to go out, like folks do, for a walk —lemonade, trampledgrass—& not feel gone from it, not take the whole gorgeous aftermath personally? I try to do June again, only this time we’re not underwater— down deep in the cold seeps, the abyssal plain with its hagfish & boneworms & hundreds of atmospheres pressed on our hearts. Remember? How fear was our warmth down there, our shared nourishment detritus of the secret drifting relentlessly into our mouths, unspeakable. Now it is out, hung on these beached ribs, extinct & free, I carry the ocean inside. In that vascular dark, so much of my flesh was imaginary. No one could see me. Only you could see me.

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