CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive

Three Poems Nancy Kuhl

Ring tiny bell rant coincident near curve wet sunlight negotiating sill and chipped-paint ceiling a lesson by hint and degree I’ll tell you why and there was also winter how you articulated joint and turn voice like a memento like a relic you whispered you supposed and my discerning my resolute spine understood I sat up to listen to longing streaming in wire-seamed glass and then and no not again the same sky-hollow afternoon the single forgettable hour how threadless and clean how I lost you finally into the pocked mouthpiece of the phone and now and nevertheless the receiver still off the hook like our imagined old days pushy signal droning like a true and ancient word unfastened and yes I am lucky in slanting shadow rigidly un- voiced I am fixed and irrevocable I am barely visible in this long-windowed room Mercury Retrograde trick of light a ghostly planet’s failure to turn its reversal like your ring slipping to knuckle like that specific absence your voice resolved recorded replayed addressing no one exactly still catching slowly this press and shade and shade the way we speak to one another our remote and decisive machine rapport not wide-eyed or singular or slight and I am of two minds I hesitate I ask and find without warning the midnight open window dreaming this ordinary radiance spilling brilliant losses and returns your answer unswerving from the urgent first it locates me nameless in the bright planet’s forgetful gaze now unguarded and unmistakable under Mercury’s perpetual spinning its distant and indelible habit Network, Constellation screenlit and glowing word by slippery word the toothy demands tiresome flicker and all this simulation this lexicon falling flat pleading won’t you without a trace of cheekbone or ribcage please and please and please and no memory of a body’s creased heat metallic shiver marching the spine every consequence rendered blank and blinking or bound and scripted almost routine steady to the end out of sight saying I want and I want more of everything illuminated page tedious marks the sender is echo echo and our distant secrets constellate radiant like cold-night far-flung stars white and always heatless Nancy Kuhl is the author of Suspend (2010) and The Wife of the Left Hand (2007). She is coeditor of Phylum Press, a small poetry publisher, and curator of poetry of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. □