| Poet's Sampler: Melanie
Cooley
Melanie Cooley recasts the rhetoric
of lyric poetry in an inventive new erotics of self and other.
Her poems are intricate, even
dense, but their complexity is rent
by aphorisms, and “once the surface / splits, the inside
is irretrievably open.”
Their explorations of boundary—edges,
inverse, obverse—suggest that all is contingent. Her subjects
are “radiant in what they did not become”; there is
no position apart from or above the whirled.
“Febrifuge,” the
central poem here, draws upon a nearly mystical
principle of holistic healing: the notion that an
elixir’s active ingredient can have an effect
after it’s been
entirely removed from the medicine. “Even
in the drug’s absence, its vibration / imprints
the solvent
molecule,” and this pharmacological ghost
gives the potion its potency. Thus, a negative
entity, and by
extension reticence itself, is reconstructed as a
puissant thing: “The largest will be undone
by its
smallest echo.” “Febrifuge”
suggests a residue composed of negative and
positive space,
matter and antimatter—an uncanny substance whose
trace rhymes deeply with grace. It is a love poem
in which
the tone of romance has mutated into something rich and strange.
Emily Dickinson called Samuel
Bowles
“My Springfield” and
Charles Wadsworth “My Philadelphia.”
In Cooley’s poems, the erotic
other is wooed as “my photon”
(a quantum of radiant energy),
and “my limbic” (emotional
and motivational components of
the brain). By such exacting means,
Melanie Cooley’s poems share Blake’s faith that one “who
would do good to another, must do
it in Minute Particulars …
For Art & Science cannot exist
but in minutely organized Particulars.”
—Alice Fulton
Match
Quick to commit, she
left
the oven on, the paper
too
close to the flame,
was “out of town and heart
rent at the loss.” The gas
soaked
rags.
The spark in the curtain.
Your
forgotten robe, fire
retardant and rose, swirls
in the gathering ash.
Stop
now.
The
cake will stay uncut, the gifts
wrapped, the ceremony not yet
snapped shut. She runs
hot
wax in a candle, pushing
the
edge, made pliant by heat, until
at last the wax
no longer held back
spatters
onto your hip.
Then
cooling. The scald never as bad
as the girl who, to see in it,
pulled down a pan of boiling
oatmeal.
The
moment past tip gives
its
center over
to gravity and you
stand, face raised. Stop now.
Promises
have been made.
Even
light, tightening
its wavelength, can cut. The casual
annual x-ray. She walks
uncovered
to the car. Once the surface
splits,
the inside is irretrievably
open. Everything
burning. All of it.
Your
cells, again, forgotten.
Febrifuge
Hold the phone to your heart.
Fiber-optic
transmission is sign
and
symptom. The pathology is distance—your voice
as light in my ear.
“The
remedy undergoes a violent
shaking—succussion—in
solution.
Then
dilute. Even
in the drug's absence, its
vibration imprints the
solvent molecule.”
Solve me. That memory
given to the living system.
Endoscopy
and phone lines—
both
fiber-optic
—reveal
gut and language
jumpy with synapse.
(Light gets under our
skin.)
Succuss
me.
(Not yet, my photon, a means to
transmute
this vascular mix to impulse and
back through slim glass.)
As
always,
illumination.
That external space still wider
than flesh, though
the
syllabic dose transcends.
_____
Symptoms come on with the first
relaxation into alpha. I wake
with skin tympanic and cardiac
pinch. For better or for worse you may feel
restless, anxious, a cold dry
wind which triggers a sudden
fever's onset. For ovarian pain on the left
and in spring: Lachesis mutus—
a venom, pyretic. (She holds
this word and the wire it
travels—hands her sister
the scissors.) A full dose inhibits
nerve function in the heart and
speeds red cell death. In dilution
the body is nudged from hot flash, from
the spasmodic period, faint, and
flutter. “Life's lot altered.” When she
draws us out: the severing
stroke
held.
Succuss
me.
(You have.)
“Sulfur
at one part per 5 x 1011 carries
scent.” (Why not you in my fissures still?)
“Dilute a vial one drop to
one hundred over one dozen iterations”: it retains
no double helix. Only a limbic state: semi-solid, harboring in
its structure
the electrochemic cast of its smallest loss. Only
memory with which to hold
that shape which could
cure this.
Solve
me.
_____
A
salmon at sea knows its home
water at 1 ppm.
Uncontain me, my limbic, we share
a skin.
The fiber optic speed of voice
converted to light and
back the cortex gets, but
at medullar levels a disparity in
scale and sense. I hear, but no scent of—
Subdermal,
electric, our
interpenetrated
cells are stretched to
archipelago by the unyielding
air. Succuss me.
You have.
Shaken.
“Fever
with a thirst and moist skin.”
Atropa
belladonna dilates the eyes
to brightness, addresses right
ovary
pain and loss of voice. The largest will be
undone by its smallest echo,
which
stimulates
the same ache as illness
and shows us balance.
Spin life in.
You may
tremble, may know
the percentage of flesh mostly fluid.
Grace That Lies
Each “right” elicits
a muddle of left
footed, switching poses as body
lags brain,
or brain shuts off and leaves
body baffled.
First, second, relevé,
plié,
sag and soften around positions
deserted for decades. Their bodies—recalling small
ease, folding double—lever
frames off the floor by muscles accustomed to the slump of desk
work
into adolescent angles and perimenopause in one pose,
shoulders back, at rest on themselves.
Nothing has passed and a life since
they leapt
across a room, formation ragged and grave, driven
by a voice of vague accent urging
higher, longer, faster, wider, reach, reach, reach—
replaced today
by a bellow,
Breathe!
and bellylaugh that elates them,
sloppily on pointe
straining higher knowing
grace that lies not in wishing
they may one day be
every girl’s music
box—Look. Their audience
is a mirror, themselves in arabesque, seagulls, and diva bows,
left, right,
the long leg, the rose. No applause
but the slap
and brush of thighs, rolls at waists
compressed
for a curtsy, a jiggle of
breasts, quick breaths at easy steps.
They are fierce,
sweat-limned,
radiant in what they did not become.
Alice Fulton's most recent
book is Cascade
Experiment: Selected
Poems. She was the 2004 Holloway Poet at the
University of
California, Berkeley,
and is the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English at
Cornell University.
Melanie
Cooley lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she is
co-owner
of Handygurl Home Repair and Remodeling. Her
poems have appeared in Persona and
Spinning
Jenny, and she has received an Emerging Artists Award from the Arizona
Commission on the Arts.
Originally published in the summer
2005 issue of Boston Review |
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