VCCA: 5

Last night I read Terrance Hayes’s Wind in a Box. An incredible book—full of moments when ideas behind the poems are so potent, lunging forward with life, that the format of lines on a page seems too pedestrian a way to process them. Even Hayes’s use of the same title, over and over (“Wind in a Box”; “The Blue Terrance”) seems to say Is this really the best construct you can come up with? We need some other form to hold these poems: an octagon that can swivel. A steel trap than can swallow. A Pythagorean triangle with wings. 

WIND IN A BOX

--after Lorca

I want to always sleep beneath a bright red blanket 

of leaves. I want to never wear a coat of ice. 

I want to learn to walk without blinking.

I want to outlive the turtle and the turtle’s father, 

the stone. I want a mouth full of permissions

and a pink glistening bud. If the wildflower and ant hill 

can return after sleeping each season, I want to walk 

out of this house wearing nothing but wind.

I want to greet you, I want to wait for the bus with you 

weighing less than a chill. I want to fight off the bolts

of gray lighting the alcoves and winding paths 

of your hair. I want to fight off the damp nudgings 

of snow. I want to fight off the wind.

I want to be the wind and I want to fight off the wind 

with its sagging banner of isolation, its swinging

screen doors, its gilded boxes, and neatly folded pamphlets 

of noise. I want to fight off the dull straight lines 

of two by fours and endings, your disapprovals,

your doubts and regulations, your carbon copies. 

If the locust can abandon its suit,

I want a brand new name. I want the pepper’s fury 

and the salt’s tenderness. I want the virtue 

of the evening rain, but not its gossip.

I want the moon’s intuition, but not its questions. 

I want the malice of nothing on earth. I want to enter

every room in a strange electrified city 

and find you there. I want your lips around the bell of flesh

at the bottom of my ear. I want to be the mirror, 

but not the nightstand. I do not want to be the light switch. 

I do not want to be the yellow photograph

or book of poems. When I leave this body, Woman, 

I want to be pure flame. I want to be your song.

-Terrance Hayes

Just buy the damn book already.