The paths not yet walked, impossible green, verdure sewn to the falls
and mists of memory entered there: water in light, limbo being aquatic. Oh Bridal Veil, oh curtains pleated with iron and rain, rapturing, pine-scented, weaving your wet gold threads through streams of wandering skin. In my dream I just get up and fly, feeling prayed over.
Kissed by absence, chance meetings, the way it was
so good to leave one city and travel south, this life in the slowness of limbo, a certain layer of births, entering that town of tattooed sailors when darkness arrived. Childhood is a human water, a water which comes out of the shadows, and feeling thirsty
I stepped into the hotel hallway late to find two girls wielding sequins, glue guns, a bag of pointy, velvet leaves. On their knees, festival costumes stretched along the carpet’s labyrinth, they turned to me, surprised: “This one’s a Mermaid, this one is Poison Ivy,” she each said, smiling, their faces twin suns shining down a night corridor.
What a lot of beings we have begun! Faint scent of marijuana on their breath. I choked up, seeing them.
What a lot of lost springs which have, nevertheless, flowed!
Young beauties, your eyes demurring, your slender hands an industry buzzing above needles and cloth, shaping starlight from scrap. In reverie we re-enter into contact, possibilities.
In search of ice, I loved the world again.
A Note on the Text: “Glimmers and Limbo” (Fugue State #1) uses found phrases from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Reverie (page 112) and a line from the daily inspirations of Indigo Minute.
Michelle Bitting’s latest collection is The Couple Who Fell to Earth (C & R Press, 2016), named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2016. She has poems forthcoming or published in The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative, Vinyl, Plume, Diode, Nimrod, the Paris-American, Fjords, and others. Poems have appeared on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Her book Good Friday Kiss won the DeNovo First Book Award, chosen by Thomas Lux and Notes to the Beloved (C & R Press) won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award and received a starred Kirkus Review as well. She has won the Beyond Baroque Foundation, Virginia Brendemuehl, and Glimmer Train poetry contests and been a finalist for the Poet’s & Writer’s Magazine California Exchange, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Julia Peterkin, and Rita Dove poetry awards, among others. Poems have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes, and most recently, The Pablo Neruda and American Literary Review Poetry Awards. Michelle has taught poetry in the U.C.L.A. Extension Writer’s Program, at Twin Towers prison and for ten years has been an active California Poet in the Schools. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University, Oregon and is completing a PhD in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute.