One Poem

Grisaille

You can hold something once
the way a match holds fire
and spend your life
as the hand after

The thing you can’t have becomes
The thing you can’t have
The thing

The ache arranges itself
like furniture in a dark room 

The divine thing gleaming
just there
just 

*

The saint’s hand passed once through your life
and you have been unclean with holiness ever since

You wanted heaven for one moment
You had it
You had her hand on your chest

You will not speak it
You will make a fist of it instead

She could put her throat in your mouth
and you would go so carefully still
you would make a religion of not closing your teeth

*

A man is a door that closes from both sides
a man is the cigarette he doesn’t smoke
to avoid another small decision

A man is the love he sees coming toward him
and steps aside for, as if it were meant for someone else

*

Is it your fate to do the honest work
of swallowing yourself
over and over like a stone?

The ballad goes: a man loved a woman
but the man was made of fog and old roads

The ballad goes: a man can love and walk away from it
because the walking is older than the love

*

You went back
—To what? To yourself?
To the shape a man makes
when he dissolves
into only the outline of endurance?

And now what
—Will you say that you’re fine
in a voice the size of a grave?

*

There is a fox who lives in the old tale
where the brave things happen
In the story he is fleet, he is wild with purpose
he crosses the distance between the forest and the light

In the actual room
you sit with your hands folded
The fox moves somewhere under your ribs
pacing, pacing, pacing

Now you work
You wake and work and the days are a straight line
But to lose something
is to claim you ever held it

The mind makes monuments of moments
then refuses them
How the divine burns when you touch it
how you return to earth with your mouth full of it

The ballad goes: nothing useful
just fog and roads, the usual

A fox, or the idea of fox
or what fox means when you mean something else
you can not-say, not-say, not-say

∩

M. Elizabeth Scott is based in Glasgow.