The Abasement of the Northmores
Hope is the thing with feathers, the fist of a house-
hold god held to the blazing sky of Hiroshima,
mon amour, my careful ever. I can’t tell this lonesomeness
from the one it’s replacing, its heft and harrow: a hawk
with a husband in its cast bronze hands, the missing quiver:
the hypotenuse between us never seemed so calculable
as when your body, my urn of ashes, bobbed out of reach
on the swollen Mersey river. Hendiadys, bowed bent like a
hatchet
who lives it over by living back: let me tell you about perforation.
I am a badly drawn creature washed up on a littered shore
and hope is the shells, small and cool, into which we hermits
each morning retract the startling need of our claws.
Copyright © 2015 by Michael D. Snediker. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 19, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Both the title of the poem and some of its language drift into it from a Henry James story of the same name; the manuscript that it’s part of, The New York Editions, is a ‘translation’ of James’s fiction into poems. Both poem and manuscript are interested in how something like desire (or hope, or lonesomeness, etc.) is and isn’t translatable across genre and time, between persons and characters: the relation between feeling and form as they wear down and into each other.”
—Michael D. Snediker
Michael D. Snediker
Michael D. Snediker is the author of the poetry collections The New York Editions (Fordham University Press, 2017) and The Apartment of Tragic Appliances (Punctum Books, 2013). He is also the author of Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), a collection of critical essays. He teaches at the University of Houston and lives in Houston, Texas.