Stephanie Cawley
To the Lighthouse
Hello to angels. Hello to
the far-off beloved.
Hello to morning
with a bruised nose
dabbed green to try
and conceal a harm.
Hello frown lines etched
in a gray face. Hello
slouched and peripheral
indifference. Hello
to the lighthouse which
features almost no
lighthouses. A woman
paints and then a war
erupts and a woman
paints again. That book’s
about painting, Rebecca says.
Rebecca who, in my dream,
I kiss. I kiss everyone,
she says, eventually,
if I find them hot. I wasn’t
for once horny because
I was busy tending the blue
bridge of my nose.
I had gotten spectacularly
drunk. I kept considering
what it would mean to stop.
Rebecca’s post says
reinvention is about revealing
your true self, punctuated
with chicken emoji.
A painter could tell me what
my problem was,
color-wise, if nothing else.
A woman bade me welcome.
A body in black clothes
in sun. I had to pretend
I hadn’t just made myself
come. I couldn’t remember
if I washed the wetness
off my hands. For days
I thought of nothing
but getting you off.
It was humid. I sweat through
my shirts. I couldn’t
tell anyone, kept studying
my face in the mirror. You can’t see
your own face, what I kept
repeating the day we hardly
left bed. When we did
we watched a man turn into
a fly on film. A life was just
a collection of images
happening to one person.
A kind of screen
for experience. I wanted,
vaguely, to cry.
I wore a shirt that buttoned
down my chest. I let you
take it off me, in my mind,
because you were far away.
I felt impossibly jealous
of your hands on a glass
in Philadelphia. Of the glass,
I mean, which got to
touch you. It was so dumb.
Love’s ruinous fictions.
You said you sat on the roof
and considered existence.
I sat in my bed and considered
your tongue. The problem
with the idea of dating is
narrative. One thing
leads to another, an eventual
endpoint. Not comfort,
exactly, but the project of
life-making. I wanted to love everyone
forever. I found the idea
of parsing desires from
thoughts inscrutable. An idea
could make you wet. Being wet
could give you an idea,
for instance wanting to clasp
the back of your neck.
I had an idea and it went like this.
It went like that, in wind.
It went like that, in black
and white, then black and blue.
A jar unscrewed then
put down on a ledge.
For each afterthought
there had to be a legacy
of skinned knees. I had
bled on the rug. Shame,
worst enemy. The real obstacle
to writing and to life.
I thought about how
I’d cling to you in the ocean.
Not afraid, not desperate.
Only the horniest teens
find themselves almost
fucking on beach towels, but
I’ve been alive for three
decades, so am like
two teenagers. I wanted
to watch you put your mouth
on someone else
and look at me while
you made them come.
The theorist reads the poem
as evidence of desire’s
puncture in the day.
A suburban lawn and then
an implied quick fuck,
though I can hardly see it
in the image of a green
landscape. There was a kind of
fucking inside the fucking,
sought after. I kept thinking
we’d get sick of it, but we kept
getting, impossibly, better.
A little more, one more
gasp, pink faces finally
opened all the way, like stars.
What Alina, in her poem,
called mid-fuck flushed
in the mirror. I knew it was
temporary, but it was
also a project, like anything
was a project. My poems,
your poems, your apartment
needing a table, my
novel needing to be read,
our salad needing assembly,
eggs needing to be sliced into
white rounds with yellow
centers. Fresh lettuce
in your mouth gave me
an edge to ride against.
A pickled red onion
stacked on peaches
and tomatoes warm from
sun. I thought beauty
was bourgeois but that was
stupid. I thought it was
beautiful to watch you fish
pickles out of a jar with
your narrow hands.
There had to be some
way to construct a life
that was all pleasure,
which seemed the only
morally good quality.
Lichens fringed pink
that look like radishes
speckle the trunks of trees.
They are both fungus
and algae, and they live
by living on some
other thing. I don’t
know how to say it. Just that
the leaves hung wet and erotic
in the sun, and you
were far away but made me come
with words and ideas,
maybe memory. If you died
I’d be so horny still with
no one to touch me. I know that’s
dramatic, I’d find someone.
We both would. We’d fuck
angels in heaven. We’d be so
good at it. I wanted to
dress you like a tiny gay
angel, in gold shorts
to show you off. I wouldn’t show you
this poem, not like
the one you said was good.
I wrote it for you
and myself because that’s how
poems work. For you and for
myself. For both fungus
and algae, white scales
and the trunk. There are plants
that grow on the branches.
One night you thought
I was teasing you but
I was just tired. I think actually
it was afternoon. I’d like to
tie you to a chair. I didn’t
always get what was hot about
denying someone pleasure.
If it was hot, I’d let
a job deny me pleasure
but it isn’t. It’s called
a hammock, where trees
make shade. I want
your cock in my mouth.
Everyone has one.
Erotica is supposed to
make you hard and then
make you come and a poem
is supposed to
have an idea in it. Maybe not
an idea. Maybe beauty.
But beauty is an idea.
By saying this is beautiful
you are expressing an idea
about beauty. I had said
I understood something new
about beauty as a result
of finding you beautiful.
This was true, you who aspire
to only a certain
rough edge. I wasn’t
afraid anymore although
at times I still sat in the corner
of a room and listened. I kept
my stories to myself
the night everyone shares
first date ideas. We fucked for
the first time, really, in
my car in a parking lot,
though I wanted
to fuck you in the alley where
earlier that night
we had both peed. A brown
cardinal is a lady. Most ladies
aren’t ladies and don’t
listen. I liked to be obscured
by greenery. Everything
in my poems had been green
or pink. I could try
adding a bit of blue. A painter
consults other painters
about their colors while
they work in the studio. Rebecca says
writing a poem is like living inside
a secret fort. You can invite
someone inside, or not.
It’s more intimate than,
for instance, watching someone
take a shit, because that
act you have no say in. This one
is all say, almost, except for
chance, intuition, passing bird
making a showy, red appearance.
I wondered whether
Virginia Woolf had the idea first, of life
fragmenting, of art fragmenting
to reveal the fragmentation
of life, or if that was
somebody else. I had no ideas
and my ideas got better
the fewer of them I seemed to have.
If the idea was no idea
but in things, I didn’t even have
things. I had your tits on my tongue.
I had a purse shaped like
a unicorn. I had my fingers
in your mouth as deep as I could.
I had once been so sad
it took up all my time. This felt
socially acceptable. Misery
more understandable than
this kind of unending heat,
wanting to be left alone
to fuck until we have to stop
and make pasta. How long
could this possibly go on.
And who cares. I practiced
thinking everyone was fine,
including myself. I wanted
a tattoo of a worm.
I wanted to bide my time
till I died. All I could do was
nothing. Pink strawberry
juice dripped down my shirt.
I’d put a painting in my little car
to drive back north,
in the backseat where
you said you liked to fuck me,
and did, so good. The scene
where the painter returns
to her painting, painting
from memory now, and not
life, the descriptions
suggest ejaculation.
This could be phallic, but I
come so much sometimes
I soak the bed.
I wrote to Rebecca about
masculinity and said
the lighthouse’s shape
is determined by its function,
having to gaze out
across the water. I watch
a video where someone
dips their hand in plaster
so they can fist
themselves. Pleasure,
is a function, too, I think,
watching your hand
fold and disappear
inside me.
Stephanie Cawley is a poet in Philadelphia. They are the author of My Heart But Not My Heart, winner of the Slope Book Prize chosen by Solmaz Sharif, and the chapbook A Wilderness from Gazing Grain Press. Poems and other writing appear in Prolit, TYPO, Protean, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, among other places. More at stephaniecawley.com.