Author: Elizabeth Cantwell

Elizabeth Cantwell has a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. Her poetry has recently appeared in such journals as PANK, Anti-, The Literary Review, and The Los Angeles Review. Nights I Let The Tiger Get You, her first book of poetry, was a finalist for the 2012 Hudson Prize and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press; her chapbook Premonitions is forthcoming from Grey Book Press. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, small dog, and many spiders. 

And I Picked It Up and Held It & Until & selections from Elegant Geometric Apocalypse

And I Picked It Up and Held It

I am watching Hoarders because I understand

some of the impulse     I think there is a betrayal

in abandoning a thing     I once bought a used book I was afraid
to open because I could feel its commitment

to the other woman     When I was a child I wanted
to have a superpower that would let me touch

an object and see all the other people who had touched it
before     How could anything come into the world

without bearing countless sets of fingerprints
Without leaving countless pieces of itself behind

in other rooms or other worlds     A boy I tutor
tells me that after filming Titanic James Cameron

did not know what to do with the boat     So he
abandoned the thing in the Gulf of Mexico

where it quickly became overrun with seals     The transition
was organic     Seals drifting through the dining room

Seals following each other down the grand staircase     Seals
turning perhaps on an upper deck at the sound of something

confused and lonely just out of sight     There is one seal
who now believes himself an architect     Which part

of my body is the fingerprint     Hold it up to the light for me
so I can keep it out of the water     Keep it away from the ink

Until

It’s not as though the cows were interested
in coming home. We had promised each other, for
so many years, that we would take turns 
& it would be all right. The mountains on the horizon
were not going anywhere. As I was typing it, I thought 
it was the cows come home to roost, but of course
that’s not it at all. Grass is plentiful & the spotted animals
with their velvet eyes could stay out in it until the autumn
comes down hard & brown around them. We had
promised each other time & we meant it. It’s just that
we didn’t think about the way the climbing tires out
your limbs. The way the trees around you really are on 
fire. The way the cows in the distance low & low & the 
rising smoke drifts up to shroud the moon & you turn to him
& tell him look, son, there’s the thing of beauty we’ve been 
telling you about, & it’s there, all right, impossibly
glowing amidst all the crumbling hills, impossibly
waiting its turn.

selections from Elegant Geometric Apocalypse

we may perform monstrous
rules     we may hold on
to necessary flight

when walter pater parted
from his lover     certainly
our atoms charted
the space between them

the strange and
lovely problem of
bodies falling from these
numberless windows

certainly     his lover

passing into our cells
at night

______________

i believe in the promised
largeness     i believe
we are left with a line
of meaning

nevertheless the
enigmatic fly
spends most of its
life with no clear

thematic truth     in
alarming pain     now an
elegant geometric
apocalypse approaches

even pythagoras suits up
to play

______________

dinosaurs occurring one
after another like
beads on a necklace

strung in terror     the
gap between the titular
hero and the unraveling
of fluids     if you find

yourself in the
mythical late 80s/early
90s     laughter seems
appropriate

the accident of the
globe is the history of
butterflies

______________

zoom in: burning birds
set beautifully in
motion     spiraling
into poetry’s trap

the city stayed in its
tent and wrote poems
for 1600 years     the city

was consciously
artistic     operating outside
the plot

zoom in again: nothing
resembles light
except a sonnet on fire
(mistaken for a bird)