Cyndle Plaisted Rials
Like X-Rays
1.
You in your physical body never appeared
in the dream—you were a concept hovering
at the edge of everything: the release
of one tension and creation of another,
the woolen sparks, the rasping
of raw silk on skin.
2.
I sewed crow wings
to my shoulder blades. More accurately, asked
you to, with your steady hand, not to mention
the unease I feel at the sight, the needle
gleaming dull
under a layer of pulled skin. I opened
my new wings out in two arches
from my shoulders—they were like mountains
in the dark.
3.
I lifted my faint despair and looked out on the landscape
with a weather eye. The mountains convulsed
and tore the low clouds. I stomped my feet, ankles knotted
in leather, beads, bells, called for a roar, a rain
that obliterates sound, flattens my mind.
4.
In the morning I was a reckless brightness,
soul alone in whisperland, you a silent
something elsewhere, in a place of packages
and bar codes,
an exact world.
5.
The people around you file
by in heavy thick-soled boots, gleaming black
against the dirty thirsty snow. Who are they?
Not the soul-saving brigade. But forget
about them. I’m writing you
this letter in the sky. You see the shapes
of my close-mouth words?
I will try to make a soft sound for you.
Photographs of the Scene
I want to be nothing to nobody and imagine what love
is like. Separate myself
from my confused misspelling
of the same words over and over—separate, recommend—
these things I am never sure of. All wrenched metal
and ripped wires, a white hand
in stark contrast. If I was likely to be struck
in seconds, what would I remember? My face
is like a halved fruit, like in a dream—curveless,
memoryless. blurring.
I am looking forward to the closing
of a finely-drawn circle. I won’t make this too purple—
I can’t distinguish a color today.
I apologize. What I’m trying to say
is about wisteria. About someone
living, or dead, or someone who never existed. I can’t tell you
any more than what I know, and that area
grows smaller
as I think, driving backwards
on a major highway.
Something about a name. Or a face. Or a head
on wet pavement, split like an overripe peach.
Cyndle Plaisted Rials lives in Maine, between the mountains and the ocean; both pull her equally. She received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and her poems have appeared in Hunger Mountain and Glass: A Journal of Poetry. She is constantly pulled in many directions in the drive to create, from teaching herself to spin yarn to learning to DJ, with varied pursuits in between.
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