After Robin Schiff
I collided with a verb that burst
into gild like a can of gold
spray paint. First in fear
and then in recourse, I collided
with ahorcarse whose stem is
an instrumental noun.
Horca: gallow
In my twenties, I craved an expensive
swing so that I might be
suspended and fucked over
a common foam mattress. I made
a grave mistake. I let myself be fucked
on the ground and am
ground down
now into catastrophe. I want to be
more devout about positioning
the husband and the rope,
the husband and the intricate
map of hat hooks he drilled
into the door of the coat closet
the day
he drove somewhere, I know
not where, to hang himself
I touched the back of the door
where he spray-painted our son’s
name and asked what
it meant to wrestle an angel.
Giacomo, Jacobo.
There are two ways of committing
suicide by hanging; suspension
hanging, the suspension of the body
at the neck; and drop hanging,
a calculated drop designed to break
the neck. When Virgil called
the noose
the coil of unbecoming death, he meant,
I know not why, to disparage
hanging as an effeminate method
of suicide. Arrendar: to use
reins to tie an animal. Rienda: rein.
In June, the rain is a dead language.
It capitulates,
it consoles. In June, everything living thing
is as loud and desolate as a tuba.
I made a grave mistake.
When my husband said help, I hid
the rope in a wheelbarrow. Who is not
repositioned by language?
I sought
answers in the potting soil and have
to bury myself now. A catastrophic
misconjugation of fear.
Two incipient people create a third
and the words that make them
more and less coherent to themselves
are encoded
in the gild of repetition. A verb sets
them in motion. It signifies no kind
of contract.
Kara Candito is the author of Spectator (University of Utah Press, 2014), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, and Taste of Cherry (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, APR, The Kenyon Review, jubilat, Forklift Ohio, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. Kara is the winner of a Pushcart Prize and the recipient of scholarships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Council for Wisconsin Writers, the Vermont Studio Center, the MacDowell Colony, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program.