Jenny Holzer Said Your Oldest Fears Are Your Worst Ones; If Only I Could See a Landscape As It Is When I Am Not There; Zero by Louie Leyson

Jenny Holzer Said Your Oldest Fears Are Your Worst Ones

I decided on precautions.

Stop speaking to anyone

you knew in the suburbs.

Smother an awful language

with another awful language.

Baby photos in the landfill.

Daily pills to blank the brain.

Don’t play mournful Rey Valera

nor sing Hotel California.

Forgetting is always an option

is what I used to think.

All too simple as a child

to misjudge the black chug

of memory’s system,

strange immortal town

rolled inside a mortal spine.

I have veered off the roads

just to drive into lakes.

I could never evade

what is long as my life.

If Only I Could See a Landscape As It Is When I Am Not There

after Simone Weil

Who am I to enter any place

when my drumming of blood

disturbs heaven? The fact

of my solidity blocking the sun’s

palace. I bore the ruby necklace

of a bull overwhelmed

by a mirror, the beastly klutz

wounded by the angled glass

that named me. This is how

I was taught to move my body

through a kingdom, expecting

every hand to open like a rose

towards my throat. Shining 

diamond of a city possessed

of no love to shed for me.

I comb the dens for a stone

to throw headlong into the sea.

Into the sea I throw the stone

because it is my heart.

Zero

Either the wind was staged by a whisper or the wind

was staged by myself. My shame is without body

therefore my puppeteer is formless. Pulled forward

I am anyway, left there to dangle deer-soft and as easily

startled. I thought I’d coax my mind pure as a field

after snow and in that milk white I’d rage ’til only wind’s

left to resent. I thought I’d die from being loved

like that, scrubbed to bone as if pain were a cleansing

thing, a brutal kind of soap. Do I overwhelm, my love?

I try to reach you through memory’s curtain and arrive

nowhere near good. If only I hid the cool jewel

of my trespasses in a more hospitable place. If only

a beast or a long forgotten dream would emerge

from the water’s unmade down just to ruin me.