Vievee Francis

Vievee Elaure Francis is an American poet, born 1963.

 

 

 

 

ANOTHER ANTIPASTORAL
Vievee Francis

I want to put down what the mountain has awakened.
 
My mouthful of grass.
My curious tale. I want to stand still but find myself moved patch by patch.
There’s a bleat in my throat. Words fail me here. Can you understand? I sink to
my knees tired or not. I now know the ragweed from the goldenrod, and the blinding
beauty of green. Don’t you see? I am shedding my skins. I am a paper hive, a wolf spider,
the creeping ivy, the ache of a birch, a heifer, a doe. I have fallen from my dream
of progress: the clear-cut glass, the potted and balconied tree, the lemon-waxed
wood over a marbled pillar, into my own nocturne. The lullabies I had forgotten.
How could I know what slept inside? What would rend my fantasies to cud and up
from this belly’s wet straw-strewn field—
these soundings.
 
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BEAST AND BEAUTY
Vievee Francis
 
He took me like a mother, drew my head toward himself,
pulled me onto his lap, wrapped his arms around me and cooed
into my hair, softly as if I was dreaming and
                                                         he didn’t want to wake me.
He sang a song that sounded like birds singing in the sycamore
then tree frogs. I wanted to leave. I stayed where I was.
He wore a lovely shirt. His hair was surprisingly kempt.
There was half a candle piece and a rug of quarters. Tomato soup
on the stove. I thought, “What a shirt.” I prayed my breasts
would magically spill from the zipper. I wanted to feel my calloused heels
on his thighs. I wanted to linger ’til dawn. His pared nails scratched
an itch that had eluded me for years. I cried as if I were slicing onions
in his kitchen. He was a good mother. He held me, like a daughter,
as if I was just as beautiful, as he believed me to be.
 
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GIVEN TO RUST
Vievee Francis

Every time I open my mouth my teeth reveal
more than I mean to. I can’t stop tonguing them, my teeth.
Almost giddy to know they’re still there (my mother lost hers)
but I am embarrassed nonetheless that even they aren’t
pretty. Still, I did once like my voice, the way it moved
through the gap in my teeth like birdsong in the morning,
like the slow swirl of a creek at dusk. Just yesterday
a woman closed her eyes as I read aloud, and
said she wanted to sleep in the sound of it, my voice.
I can still sing some. Early cancer didn’t stop the compulsion
to sing but
there’s gravel now. An undercurrent
that also reveals me. Time and disaster. A heavy landslide
down the mountain. When you stopped speaking to me
what you really wanted was for me to stop speaking to you. To
stifle the sound of my voice. I know.
Didn’t want the quicksilver of it in your ear.
What does it mean
to silence another? It means I ruminate on the hit
of rain against the tin roof of childhood, how I could listen
all day until the water rusted its way in. And there I was
putting a pan over here and a pot over there to catch it.
 
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HOW DELICIOUS TO SAY IT
Vievee Francis
 

to allow it like hibiscus to wend over the tongue
where it opens at the gate, lending its red, unknowable
taste. What wonder the palate may embrace – in a flick
behind the teeth: loquacious, Liebchen, Schätzchen.
Let us praise the labium that shapes such syllables, and
parlay of their attendant assumptions like a shuttlecock
struck back and forth over its simple backyard net.
Let us not neglect, but laud the mature mouth ready
for more than a dollop, the spoonful of lip, loon,
April, billow, or some simple pronoun. No. It wants jouissance,
Dostoevsky, provocations heating the exchange, say
chipotles in the chocolate. Consider the uvular awakenings
of the day, the throat stretched to signify its pleasure and release.
Your name spun through the reel, wound up from the bass
of me. How I want to say it, and hear my own, again.

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I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT LOVE AGAIN
Vievee Francis
 
Those who live to have it and
those who live to give it.
Of course there are those for whom both are true,
but never in the same measure.
Those who have it to give are
like cardinals in the snow. So easy
and beautifully lit. Some
are rabbits. Hard to see
except for those who would prey upon them:
all that softness and quaking and blood.
Those who want it
cannot be satisfied. Eagle-eyed and such talons,
any furred thing will do. So easy
to rip out a heart when it is throbbing so hard.
I wander out into the winter.
I know what I am.