Lillian Nećakov is the author of many chapbooks as well as il virus (Anvil Press), Hooligans (Mansfield Press), The Bone Broker (Mansfield Press), Hat Trick (Exile Editions), Polaroids (Coach House Books), The Sickbed of Dogs (Wolsak and Wynn), Midnight Glossolalia, a collaborative poetry collection with Scott Ferry and Lauren Scharhag (Meat for Tea Press), Duck Eats Yeast, Quacks, Explodes; Man Loses eye, a collaborative poem with Gary Barwin (Guernica Editions). She lives in Toronto.
Never Mind the Wind
a letter from Georgia O’Keeffe
Never mind the wind, it’s just a question I might be asking, the sound a mouth makes through the blue hole bone, winter’s mane loosening, a choir of fluttery orange skirts, the stars dying, grandmothers being born.
I was a coyote once, a merciful, yellow-eyed beast, prowling up Chimney rock, over Orphan Mesa collecting end facts, the wheyfaced carrion of wild things. Picking cow skull, antler, rib, sacrum, beak, Spanish goat, big horned sheep, jackrabbit- because there were no flowers, because here, I am alive in the Dustburst winds.
If you dream, dream of me as a horse head at the foot of Sangre de Cristo Mountains because that’s where I am happiest. Because you don’t need Mary Magdalene if you come this side of the Hudson. Here, where the skin ages into turquoise, apache tears, fire agate and quartz, here, where the snow is a body melting under a coral house of hooves.
I was a photograph once, stirring up the devil in a man twice my age. I walked a tightrope of lilac clouds in my tunic made of tanglehead, buffalo grass and mesquite the ladder held for twenty years until my name was “widow”, until the seasons made a stone of me, until he was nothing more than a wind jewel.
Call me marrow-orange, periosteum-yellow, fascia- blue, jack-in-the-pulpit, dreamwalker, Jimson weed. Meet me at the black cross, no one is ever singing in Christ in the Desert Monastery. Meet me, meet me at the oryx crossing where Quetzalcoatl will wrap you in serpent feathers until you feel the tug of animal against spirit. Nothing under this sky is easy.
And when the time comes, burn it all, burn it and fill the saltshakers with your ashes, let them lace the gap winds, the horse latitudes, the roaring forties, the easterlies and the westerlies with the wildness of you. Never mind the wind, never mind the flames, lie next to this impossible life and burn it all.
If Frank O’Hara Was my Father
My father smelled of graphite, pink pearl erasers, paper. Petrol, adrenaline, sometimes whisky and sometimes an empty street. I’m afraid, I’m afraid sometimes he smelled like a hunter. His hands were fence posts, stairs to the cellar, Orion and Cassiopeia, cream soda, a torch, a too long winter, something like love’s frail shadow, dancing through us.
We are all born digging a hole. Sharpening our tongues on blood and time until the dream is a word is a story is what we could have, should have been. If Frank O’Hara was my father, I’d have a boxer’s nose and bird would be a Tennessee Warbler, Snow Bunting, Canvasback, Hermit Thrush, a mute swan, a place, a machine, a factory, a world as beautiful as listening for the hurt.
If I believed in angels, I’d open the book wide to find the skin of them in Frank’s words.
Being stuck in traffic would be a false geography, a wee meadow made of swallows, pushing the city away, talking to the stars. If Frank O’Hara was my father every window would be an artery, weightless with song and I, I’d be the robin’s nest he returned to again and again.
Halcyon Days
A Chara Manchàn,
I’d like to think I was born a stone moving sunwise in the palm of your hand through the great fires built on the shoulders of dark words. Of the earth, salt and tide. I’d like to think that if you asked, Isn’t it yourself, the language alone would burn inside of me and I might appear at your back door answering, It’s me.
You are a man of your word.
I find myself speaking to the ice in ways no human can understand. From the other side of the rational mind with half a tongue in the grave. Distant, loamy sounds, a briny mouthful of un-limitlessness.
How a puddle is no longer just a puddle but Plobán – “a hole hollowed out by the hoofs of beasts, then filled with rain”.
Manchàn, I think we’d agree that every word has a skin, a ghost, a shadow.
There’s been some trouble in the world of late. The wind is broken-hearted, waiting night after night and no one wants her to walk them home, no one sees the enoughness of this simple act of kindness. If I were other, I’d be the glow of the sea as it comes to you in memory or maybe the complexion of an early spring dusk tinted with devilment.
In Eagle Pass, the banks of the Rio Grande bulge with generations of argot, rosaries and paperclips.
Some call it burdensome trash. Continents away, the light at half mast, I am here mourning future losses. While you, Manchàn, roam the diaspora of dead dogs collecting the invisible mitochondria of the way we spoke and sang ourselves into the land. If I were other, I’d be an apple whose sweetness trickled off your tongue like a poem. I’d be that imaginary sovereign place inside ourselves.
But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.
If I am the walrus, you are the walrus. We are the walrus. Stowaways, with one another in a wobbly poem suffering the confessions of a large wind. In a field for conjuring the house I will die in. In a field and another and another. Standing together like I can’t remember when overlooking the wheat twisting this way and that into a nervous system of forgotten words.
That large wind, always meaning what it is saying.
When you return from the forest alone with yourself, there is an utterance for that too. It will take you your entire life to unearth the shape and lilt of that sound. Then hold on, hold on to the living. Everything disappears sooner or later but if you listen, listen between the creak and holler, if you hold on to the living, you will hear the foreverness of you.
Dear Manchàn, it’s hours into the night already, I’m tired, I’ll see you in the funny papers.
*Werner Heisenberg quote
*Beatles lyric
The Galway Review 