I WANT TO STUDY YOUR IMAGINATION IN BETTER LIGHT

 

I don’t know how to regret other people’s birthdays mechanically.

I haven’t yet learned how to rescue the sky from its gray belongings.

I lost all of my marketable skills in a war I never fought.

This morning I watched a sparrow blink repeatedly

and I thought about inventing a new kind of mystery for you.

It would be a mystery of astrological feelings and small kind words with many arms.

It would be shaped like a small gift of infinite desire or fractured peace.

The biggest religion is made of blue space and wildly imaginative stories about luck.

Someday I would like to build a train station filled with taller versions of you.

The location of suspicion in the human body is just above the neck,

somewhere to the left of mouth and somewhat south-east of an eye when it is closed.

Open this answer and tape it to the ceiling! I whispered this in your ear ten times.

Summer is a place without fear. Winter is a place without keys when you are lost in the woods.

It would be insincere to compare me to an educated wine glass.

It would be insincere to compare you to anything less than

a hundred of itself divided into perfect pairs like intimate stars

from surrounding galaxies of very severe and ambiguous light.

A journey of hard calculations takes place in my kitchen.

I watch it ruefully move across the linoleum toward a corner

that knows not to ask itself too many questions about masculinity.

This is how we move toward beautiful shapes and brave discoveries.

Unreasonable stories compose themselves against the papered walls

like a group of children waiting for the last rainbow in the desert,

their ambitions like wild young horses waiting for fresh water in the middle of the longest night.

If you look inside your basket of marriages, you will find miracles disguised as ripened plums,

anonymities dressed as torn palm leaves living their lonely second lives.

The mortality rate of the common firefly is a continuous fraction.

I continue to wonder about the amputative quality of elected trees.
 
 
 
IN SHARE OF LIGHT 3

 

The west is a continuous parish,

rows of surprised cotton shirts

facing the triumph of winter’s courage.

I said hello to my life

I said hello come to life.

I said light-winged orchid of the grey son.

I said ten things about love into the shirts,

all surprised and full of ribs and dark fish

streaming toward the white angle of a mountain.

I spoke politely into an angel’s blue rib.

Spectator’s winter sex lights a romantic fire.

The wet splatter and how we culminate

is a figure of the spoken imperative.

In the fall the wires hang up our luck.

I take a test about the meaning of one.

I test out the meaning of it,

inject a small convenience into it.

Somebody’s wet hands hang on the street.

We are paralyzed into fractioning

like one of some beloved deer.

Wed my luck into a collision.

I will weave you through its encouraging gate.
 
 
—-
 
 
Eszter Takacs is the author of the chapbooks Together We Will Talk Right Down to Earth (The New Megaphone, 2014) and The Spectacular Crash (H_NGM_N, 2014). Her first full-length poetry collection, The Miraculous Hysterical, was awarded the Joanna Cargill Prize for first books and is forthcoming from Coconut Books in 2015. Her poems have also appeared in Salt Hill, Coconut, DIAGRAM, Ghost Proposal, Smoking Glue Gun, Inter|rupture, Cloud Rodeo, Forklift Ohio, Thrush, Birdfeast, Timber and Softblow.