Seven poems by Elizabeth Metzger
Elizabeth Metzger's second full-length collection Lying In will be published by Milkweed Editions in April 2023. She is also the author of The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, as well as the chapbooks The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death and Bed, winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, APR, and Poem-a-Day. She writes, teaches, and edits in Los Angeles, where she is a poetry editor at Los Angeles Review of Books.
The Whole Way
You will walk through the worst
forest like any tree
toward a glowing yellow
hole in the ground you would
almost have to step over if you were
just human.
It will be a bird why not
I cannot fly so I glow
and if that’s sorrow you
scoop it into your fat palm
where the lines of a lifetime
belong to you alone
and leave you alone at both ends.
The bird guides you where you don’t know
you’re going then wilder
in my safety
you ask the bird not me
what do you lose by protecting
who would ever sleep
Daughter as Myself
She feeds her rabbits.
Without their mouths they eat. Ah
their instincts are taken away.
Why twitch why hop when buckled when this world
is choosing between buckles.
Eyeing the fake moss that grows over the kitchen gate
she used to want safe want safe more
than wanting at all.
What would she do with one tooth.
What would she do with a substance to crunch only
in the same spot repeatedly.
Taste no taste.
Pull a sheet over your tongue if you have to.
Invent a tongue
for the carrot. This meal is purely
for passing through.
Every Child Alone
The world closed. The family
went back to its origins.
Didn’t they move away finally
as they promised?
Here in my future, is this
the hotel you told me about?
It is summer I guess.
I haven’t been outside since winter.
I am a child
still of extremeness.
I run into the arms of a man.
I never even loved him in real life.
He fathers me in a dream.
I know he has to stand for me
his face a clear wish for beginning.
He is my emptiest thing.
My brain shrinks in daylight.
My fingers degenerate so early.
The past is moving, I am young already.
My mother speaks her old German
she never taught us a word of—
consonants of a house settling.
We never lived in a house.
If I feel sure
I will never understand her
she can feel the same about me, she says, and adore me.
What does it mean you regret all of it?
We tried. We could not have talked longer.
She says I have never known violence,
and I remember
I knew you. Oh my god do I know you.
None Other
What she wants is for the new house to be an old house,
older than anything she owns. Older
than her father. No,
older than sexual love.
In dreams she cannot enter the new house.
She knows it’s hers only because it’s time
for her father never
to be old again. Always, always
from the bottom step
she knows she will wake in a spasm
having been satisfied by a house
she has never entered.
For Now
Fathers are sleeper trains to me.
Nobody takes them
except the few who would rather spend lifetimes
than have more time
here.
Oh they are elegant to watch
departing.
I had imagined death
as light leaving the body
but I see it is the body leaving
itself.
Was
The last scent I smelled before my father died
was a rose
I thought was a woman.
Like him it went away before I thought about it.
Long after that I plucked it.
Why now? I thought then.
Because it will never be my mother
but something else I once had.
Only now can I believe he ever arrived via the female body.
Only now have I considered he might still alter.
His Mind Goes Once I Get There
I am not in the room when he tries to get in my bed.
No. This is your daughter’s room, the aide says.
This is my house! he says. For the last time
he knows himself
more than he doesn’t know me.