Lisa Samuels teaches at the University of Auckland. Her new poetry books are Throe (Oystercatcher 2009) and Tomorrowland (Shearsman 2009), and she has recent poems in Landfall, Hotel Amerika, Jacket, and elsewhere. Current projects include Metropolis, a poetic fantasy of urbanization, and Anti M, a book of omitted prose.
Chiasmus
In which I hand you
metonymic altruism
or handily configure you gone
gross weight to some tariff
restraints, your formerly hands
and formly eyes winging
sideways to a rescue – of yourself –
perhaps the tally is all sequenced
the twins already twinned into
quiescent virtues of themselves, he’s
a sad example of ______, she of why
or when the painful attribution of
circumstance reaches them
I never gave for any reason – he was not
sad because he isn’t ‘made that way’
a perfect synchrony in the gardens
that could be undone never
instead I think I’ll tell her
things we’ve decided and having done
them all spliced in a window
I was wedged inside, in favor
of non-virtues, that was a door
my hand got to know
she was fondling her idea of what he stood for
without realizing or pretending that realizing
was a thing she could cut out – I remember
furtively the air too, guitar riffs,
pillows, purple walls, ‘Botticelli’ and
her dimples and those twins
speaking in asynchronic domesticity, their
sly nonexistence proven over and again
