Notes on what I’ve heard called the End of America; or, Self-Portrait as the Second Mrs. de Winter
Marissa Davis
After Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
If there are not phantoms
in the attic, lover,
there are phantoms
hatching from your spine.
Or sleeping cat-like
in the bed between us
or feathered
under the cartilage of my throat.
It means very little
to scream. My voice,
like me, native
to elsewhere,
though look how strung my limbs
within this web
of gothic majesty;
my being reared to manifest
as all luxe and decay—a difference
that tapers like daylight. Yes, I crawled
into her septic force, gummed
her clothes to my skin
like so many wood ticks. Told to fragment
my wrong and haunted body
like a china vase against the sneering
terrace stone,
I almost did it.
I almost did it.
I have called this place
my home, though it
has wrecked me.
And somehow still I call it home
though, so untender,
it spits embers at my back.
Some blazing house
is always telling me to burn,
and all I know to do
is grieve for it.
Darling, I can’t say much,
but that in a springless world
our little kingdom
is deciduous, and this season
burdening our name.
Consumption
knowledge is a night-
ripe fruit—jungle
of tooth,
chest, thigh,
pomegranate.
suddenly unforbidden,
we learn in the hunt
how: supplication
is muscular,
is lip & chew,
tongue, tremor
: prayer submits
to be
a brief
calescent foliage, shudder
of damp skin : fingers
exhume the trill
of our want,
our carbonous
smell, our understanding
that satiation is never
so much stutter
as seize; like lung,
only gorges
to re-empty. mouthful
of a primitive art like foreign tongues our bodies
rear into struggle
syntax.
against
yours heat-thick, slick with my ache
& frenzy; mine
tugs forward
toward your berry palate.
taken, taker, tangled,
we bloom
bare & parallel—
( o voracious
perianth )
howl—
( o eden avid
as stomach )
slacken—
( o plum
blossom, syrup
stigma ),
quivering,
equivalent.
gasping
on paradise, all pulp
& appetite, your mouth
sighs into my mouth again
& the taste of me
returns to me:
cracked salt
& persimmon. is not
every thing
holy
so nectared, cyclic.
is not hunger
the first & last divinity.
Requiem for a Rabat Hammam
Steam & my body plump & deranged
as a stormhead. Eden lost
to the whim of teeth, my two hands
hardly a single fig leaf. Even mist
an imagined condemnation
of eyes, light-lean, splitting me
like water splits
against the tiles’ blue sag.
Splash & I was raised that a good woman
bolts knees & binds
indefinite ankles & wears her body
ambiguously, wears her body like a bracelet
that is slipping off her wrist as she walks.
& she is otherwise occupied
ruminating the most effective ways
to vanish. & here my breasts lolling
& my splayed palms urgent
& repentant & incapable of miracle.
Oil & the bald skin slick as tongue.
too freshly shaved & every pore
a conflagration & a woman touches me, black
soaps, sloughs & presses: here the tyrannical
shoulder, here the sinister
arm & back & stomach
yet she does not recoil
& how did I not notice all around—
new mothers, slack-bellied,
their toddlers drumming their gracious thighs;
hipless girls with thready saffron calves;
elders’ wilted calligraphy of folds;
heat & my recent skin becoming
gray flake, washing away with the water.
O how we in the bath
are an alphabet of women.
& for the first time
my hands drop,
my body shouts its name.
Marissa Davis is a poet and translator from Paducah, Kentucky. Her original poems have appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Duende, Verse of April, Rattle, and The Iowa Review; her translations are forthcoming in Ezra and Mid-American Review. She will be pursuing an MFA in poetry at NYU beginning Fall 2019.