Repetition Compulsion

    The rottweilers bunch in their muscle
    & mass-- their mistress

    Quickens in bed, poulticed
    By stain, repetition of stain.

    I want them all, all of the gods.

    Scarify me--

    Like the small peach the vaccination
    Leaves in its imprint on skin--

    Little oracle-- pugnacious
    & sweet. I have never been taken

    Like this-- a coal mine
    Gone blank past the last night

    The last metal-caged light
    Was snapped out. Bird folds its wing.

    In the absence of game,
    Dog will eat dog.

    How I wish the wolves
    Would return to the city, monotonous

    & tender in their monogamy.
    The city. The courting. The gate.

    Even now as the gate opens, I startle.

    You enter suddenly & I am nowhere again.

    In a mistress' bed, I am
    Constant as a null Iraqui coin, worn

    Down on its side, by Euphrates,
    The Tigris, all of the gods.


    Tender

    Then in the glass window of a streetcar, a godhead
    Passes on, gone from this will for living on like a book

    About a book, rote & morphinic
    As a wetnurse travelling immune

    With her small black bag on the train
    To a minor city to feed some other's young

    In the blush of antibodies, passing on.
    Dear One, I have woken in the wingspan

    Of a butcherbird, hung on the barbs of bad
    Dreams like a metal rail fashioned out of thorns.

    Odor of petrol, odor of hemlock bowing down, as the train
    Passes from the city's circumferences of wire fence past

    Recognition to an old World, I will be immuned
    To knowing it. Do not forget this kind of tenderness.




    Bio Note
      Lucie Brock-Broido is the author of two books of poems, A Hunger and The Master Letters. From 1988 to 1993 she was a Briggs-Copland Poet at Harvard University. She has taught at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at Princeton University, and is currently Director of Poetry in the Writing Division at Columbia University. Her poems have appeared in many journals and magazines, including the Denver Quarterly, Harvard Magazine, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker. She has been awarded a Guggenheim and most recently an NEA grant. Lucie Brock-Broido lives in New York City and in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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