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A review by mepresley
Animal Eye by Paisley Rekdal
dark
emotional
reflective
4.75
Excerpts from my favorite poems:
"Why Some Girls Love Horses"
...I too might stop wanting
the hand placed on back or shoulder
and never feel the desired respose.
I loved the horse for the pain it could imagine
and inflict on me. ...
....
...I loved
what was not slave or instinct, that when you turn to me
it is a choice, it is always a choice to imagine pleasure
"Flowers from a New Love after the Divorce"
It doesn't matter. Even cut stems heal.
But what is the point of pain if it heals?
Some things should last forever, instructs
the florist's note. Pleasure,
says one god. Shame, says another.
"Nightingale"
In the story, the man binds himself
so that he can listen. He wants to hear
the music that will pull him down.
He wants to put his head where the heart lives,
that small, hard singing behind a ribcage.
"Wax"
The real has no limits, and still, is full of limit.
We think the heart matters. We think the breath,
too, and they do, that i what the way says, and then
denies it: you are a king, too, and if you have loved him so long
by his symbol, here is something more exact.
....
I am man because I suffer
the thing gas voice leaks inside the chamber, or is it,
I am man because I make others
suffer in my place?
How much enough to call it evidence?
"Easter in Lisbon"
...We were two people who prayed simply
to see ourselves as apart
from this obscene symbolism
we'd been made into, that we'd in part
made out of each other, emblems forever latent
in this poem's opening, a racism we've worked
into our language that twists imagery out of imagery, the tale
quietly doubled with each syllable it's spoken--
Apt metaphor for love itself, but it really
isn't love I'm speaking of, except perhaps the token
love of self, the self's need for an objectivity
that helps it survive. What were we doing in Portugal
but trying to change but also keep
some deeper part of us intact, the secret self
you saw in me as well, ...
...So now if clarity of vision
might drain away rage,
I ask you, Tell me what you see. Explain
your landscapes of Spain, Portugal;
rewrite the details that frustrated
and finished us. Tell me about that terrible
zoo you never visited, its bright spray
of lemur bodies running
from their cage to escape into the gray
and fog-drenched city,
this time inciting in their desire
all the other animals to flee,
"Homage for Levis"
What angers me is how
you've become just a story
I struggle to follow, stalking the tracks of birds
in the wind, while the sea & sky
empty around me, their colors showing where everything
must separate and end.
....
Do you know the map you once gave me?
And here I am, still maneuvering by it.
Now I need a destination,
if not an answer. I need a place
in which every kind of story makes sense to me.
"Why Some Girls Love Horses"
...I too might stop wanting
the hand placed on back or shoulder
and never feel the desired respose.
I loved the horse for the pain it could imagine
and inflict on me. ...
....
...I loved
what was not slave or instinct, that when you turn to me
it is a choice, it is always a choice to imagine pleasure
"Flowers from a New Love after the Divorce"
It doesn't matter. Even cut stems heal.
But what is the point of pain if it heals?
Some things should last forever, instructs
the florist's note. Pleasure,
says one god. Shame, says another.
"Nightingale"
In the story, the man binds himself
so that he can listen. He wants to hear
the music that will pull him down.
He wants to put his head where the heart lives,
that small, hard singing behind a ribcage.
"Wax"
The real has no limits, and still, is full of limit.
We think the heart matters. We think the breath,
too, and they do, that i what the way says, and then
denies it: you are a king, too, and if you have loved him so long
by his symbol, here is something more exact.
....
I am man because I suffer
the thing gas voice leaks inside the chamber, or is it,
I am man because I make others
suffer in my place?
How much enough to call it evidence?
"Easter in Lisbon"
...We were two people who prayed simply
to see ourselves as apart
from this obscene symbolism
we'd been made into, that we'd in part
made out of each other, emblems forever latent
in this poem's opening, a racism we've worked
into our language that twists imagery out of imagery, the tale
quietly doubled with each syllable it's spoken--
Apt metaphor for love itself, but it really
isn't love I'm speaking of, except perhaps the token
love of self, the self's need for an objectivity
that helps it survive. What were we doing in Portugal
but trying to change but also keep
some deeper part of us intact, the secret self
you saw in me as well, ...
...So now if clarity of vision
might drain away rage,
I ask you, Tell me what you see. Explain
your landscapes of Spain, Portugal;
rewrite the details that frustrated
and finished us. Tell me about that terrible
zoo you never visited, its bright spray
of lemur bodies running
from their cage to escape into the gray
and fog-drenched city,
this time inciting in their desire
all the other animals to flee,
"Homage for Levis"
What angers me is how
you've become just a story
I struggle to follow, stalking the tracks of birds
in the wind, while the sea & sky
empty around me, their colors showing where everything
must separate and end.
....
Do you know the map you once gave me?
And here I am, still maneuvering by it.
Now I need a destination,
if not an answer. I need a place
in which every kind of story makes sense to me.