The Tick and the Tock
The Tick
You don’t know if the mark on your skin is new
because you can’t tell if it has legs. If, when
you magnify the mark, it does, then you have to
get it out. My mother used to do that with a lit
cigarette by bringing it close enough to burn
my thin skin, and when the legs backed off
she would kill them. Sometimes the pain from
the ashes would wake me. Sometimes I’d dream
red eyes circling my bed, wolves around a tent.
They ask that about a poem—does it have legs?
And if, when you look closely, it does, you’d
best get it all down because if you don’t you
Can come down with what looks like flu but, unlike
flu, will last the rest of your life. Odd, I’d say,
that you never think how those legs emerged,
clinging to a slim blade of swaying grass
at the side of some trail, and how only by chance
did you pass by and sweep them away.
The Tock
You know the mark on your skin is old
because every day it is new at dawn, then
through the hours magnifies, darkens, outs
the loss—yesterday’s, tomorrow’s—close
against your flesh like tiny legs, circling.
My lover used to wake me, her eyes the lit
cigarettes of my dreams, burning and red
with the closeness we needed… feared…
but craved, whether wolf or angel.
They ask that about love—can it stand
and keep moving, have the full body
the heart needs for the rest of your life?
Can a heart have legs, or must it settle
only for itself, for always running on
in place—in those ones, tens, hundreds,
schmundreds—until nothing can hold
it back, unless it holds itself back—
holds back, rests, then becomes nothing?
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
for Aimee
Oberon: Fetch me this herb; and be thou here again
Ere the leviathan can swim a league.
Puck: I’ll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes.
Suppose the world were only Puck—
absent all royals and lesser nobles,
absent fools and fairies,
filled by the good heart so good
even its trickery is love and playfulness,
the scheming just innocent dreaming of joy.
But there is no summer, no night, no dream—
a winter’s afternoon, this tale, and true:
a young friend in the part cannot dissolve
the magical line so cannily wrought,
so there she is, before me always,
even when silent and out of sight.
She could cause love, this Puck, to fly
via the purple flower’s juice, laid in any eye
to save a life or mock it forcefully;
she did this with a forty-minute flight
around the Earth, mocking its vastness
to enthrall her school friends, their smugness.
If the same chills rise from Puck’s sweet amends
as from sagging Lear’s quintuple nevers,
where now in this thousand-and-more-page world
do we find ourselves—our footing, our hearts?
Dear Aimee, bosom friend of my daughter,
outshining history and magic seems
so right for you, so nearly right for us.
Why They Are Good
I recall, in sunlight,
a strange angle of your leg
as you lay naked on the ground.
– The first good lines I ever wrote.
Because arousal gives back
poetry to passion, passion to poetry.
Because five ls are one
antidote to hell.
Because five ns make everything
grow, placing the whole tongue
against the palate and not
merely the leading tip, so useful
so often otherwise.
Because the syllables stepladder—
six, seven, eight—and the accents
swell—three, three, four—to meet
the arrival of nakedness.
Because the full force of the story
lies behind the three lines,
the twenty-one syllables left
to dream of adding the real
tongue, the real legs, the real.
The most recent of Stephen Corey’s dozen books are As My Age Then Was, So I Understood Them: New and Selected Poems, 1981-2021 (White Pine Press, August 2022), in which these three poems are published, and Startled at the Big Sound: Essays Personal, Literary, and Cultural (Mercer University Press, 2017). In 2019 he retired after 36 years of editorial work with The Georgia Review.
Header photo by Simmons Buntin.
