Elaine Elizabeth Belz
TO RULE THE NIGHT

The ground below is a black sea full of stars,
little constellations that signify nothing
but mapped isolation. I blink back.
I understand. I, too, am a dying star,

caught in the vast permanence of blackness
that endlessly receives our offerings of light.
The night sky is a shrine. Its ancient relics
foreshadow what fossils we might also become.

From my vantage point, I could be a priest
for all those little helpless ones gathered below.
But I know no incantation,
no rite, except my own

ritual of longing. I imagine I chant holy words
that I could never know, but by some dark mystery.
The little lights pour out their responsorial halos
onto the concrete below them.

They look like Christmas tree lights,
glistening and ornamental, magical,
and dim. Clustered together, they must think they are
lighting the sky.

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This is a different perspective: the view from above. Looking at the stars (above or below) does tend to reveal what's going on inside us, I think, and that's what this is about.

This poem's just over a minute long (1:04), but that includes me saying the title. My friend John Finan recorded me reading it in his studio some years back. Anyone with editing software (I don't have any) could remove the title. It's from my 2000 book, To Kiss the Sun and Mean It. I would love to see an illustration (personally I'd prefer non-literal) if anyone should feel so inspired!

As with all the poems I post here, the text is supplied below. Feel free, if you want to use it for anything, to re-record the voice as your needs (pacing, timbre, pitch, etc.) might dictate. Whoever "you" may be!

Elaine Elizabeth Belz

40

Must this dark picture be my destiny?
In your penned note, I hear my own voice call…
The windows turn to mirrors at night-fall,
As I act scenes from your blind prophecy.

In your penned note, I hear my own voice call –
The woman you were, I will one day be.
As I act scenes from your blind prophecy,
I watch my life drip slowly down the wall:

The woman you were, I will one day be.
Here, in your last words, you describe it all –
I watch my life drip slowly down the wall;
I grope to salvage what is left of me.

Here in your last words you describe it all.
Must this dark picture be my destiny?
I grope to salvage what is left of me…
The windows turn to mirrors at night-fall.
___________________________

This is from my 1998 book, When Midnight Comes Around, whose theme was identity. The poem itself was inspired by a scene in the opening pages of Linda Grey Sexton's biography of her mother, poet Anne Sexton, titled Looking For Mercy Street. That's where the title comes from (a fragment of a letter from the poet to her daughter), but it's also a significant number in the Bible, a symbol of trial or testing in which one proves one's mettle (think of the Israelites wandering for 40 years after the Exodus, or Noah on the ark 40 days & nights, according to one version of the story, or of Jesus in the wilderness 40 days).

I didn't know much about the formal style of a pantoum at the time; I'd only read (and memorized for my French Phonetics class) Baudelaire's poem, "Harmonie du Soir," which, it turns out, is a pantoum.

Sometimes in a pantoum (such as "Harmonie du Soir") the beginning and ending are a little different. I chose to close the circle, so to speak. I felt it would add to the claustrophobic feeling I was going for, while at the same time throwing into relief (I hope!) the transformation that's taken place as the persona has come to see herself and her surroundings differently: in the beginning of the poem, the windows changing to mirrors close the persona off into a prison of sorts; by the end of the poem, I hope, they represent insight she has gained about herself and her agency.

I highly recommend writing a pantoum. I've only written this one, but it was a blast. It's kinda like a crossword puzzle, since, any time you place a line, it pops up somewhere else and prescribes what you can do next (or where you can place your next line). Definitely a challenge but a really heady one!

***For collaborative purposes: As with all poems I put up here, feel free to re-record the voice if you want for any reason, and/or to edit the title off the front of my reading, or tweak the speed, etc. The recording as it stands is :55. Feel free to excerpt lines for other purposes (illustrations, tiny stories, setting to music, "remixing" your own poem, etc.).

Elaine Elizabeth Belz
NEW YEAR’S EVE

Words hang in a thick fog between us,
hiding your subtle expressions from my view.
Our gestures have slowed to meaningless ritual.
The constant falling snow is white air,
tangible enough to almost grasp.
It covers up our footprints,

just like it smoothed over the wound where the sun
burned its escape-hole in the glacial sky.
We watch the sun fade, fade away…

While we stand here, frozen,
waiting to succumb to some new Ice Age
and leave the bones of our interactions
for future paleontologists to decipher,

committing this scenery to be preserved
under the layers of our fallout.
In playful wisps the drifting powder
whirls like chimney smoke, or ghosts
of carefree autumns, summers, springs –
The past unwinds, driven by the wind.
It melts to nothing if you try to hold it on your tongue.

So winter lays its numbing pall on us:
even the glimmer in your eyes
is frosted over now, and dimmed…
From behind its glassy scar tissue,
the glowing sun winks smugly,
sears into my breast a yearning
to also blaze through the icy veil, into heaven,
and set myself among the eternal stars.