Barbara Tomash : Two Poems for Elizabeth Robinson

 from Report from the Robinson Society, Vol. 1, No. 1

 

 

 

 

Do you mind if I steal a bit from you

1.
In an imaginary way I am attracted to you
You offer from yourself a house of water
I’m a sort of tidal process for you
This is a third hand relating of you
You experience the disjointure, the disarticulation
You lay them out side by side for comparison
The idea is that you would dissolve yourself
To keen the terms of escape uproot you
And you will find the abandoned street
You don’t think of turning back
You are independent of nature
Here you may rise as disguise
Instead you go away entirely

So now for you

2.
Before you and I were born logic defined itself
Camouflaged scrap on which to lay your head
You borrow a puppet crudely carved in your own likeness
Then the question: Is a breath inflating your body
For you are benumbed by this ether
A part of you might start up and run away
You may break your arm
You will know your own tongue
Do you mind if I steal a bit from you
You see the sails, I want you to see the masonry

3.
You were given into my care
I was given to driving you in my car and around the world
I kiss you tongue in my cheek

 

4.
Carry us in your special drowning wings
And birds, in this name for air, will be given to you
You conceal under your tongue bird trinket
Treasure spurting from you
I know you put your body in her nest
Could you hold your breath
You are to be wrapped securely to rest
But the dream hand lifts ahead of you
Now I grow from you, speak solely in your voice
I see you more greenly, encased in sunlight
You said that you found my trinkets in the gutters of the city

 

 

 

One asks the other
 

in what landscape did a woman trace a dwelling
an anonymous woman     continuous of smoke
how can abandonment be a symptom of  
a friend of a friend, her footprints’ bereftness
what’s the use of a tampered with picture     
its reflection warped and wavering, what does
she want, one line atop another, she ties a suffocated knot
to make a pattern of inevitability, the sense of horizon
away from the limits of two dimensionality, what does
she wait for, in tension, an unnamed body rubbed raw
by a feeling of warmth      disentangling from the feeling of flight
how does she help record a history of the scant privation,
the naked vanishing, why is balance like teetering

 

 

 

Note:

These two poems were composed using lines collaged from the writings of Elizabeth Robinson. Do you mind if I steal a bit from you assembles lines and fragments from Robinson’s books Apprehend, The Orphan and Its Relations, Rumor, Counterpart, and Apostrophe. For One asks the other I used lines only from Apprehend and The Orphan and Its Relations—two of my favorite books (that is, if I had to pick favorites from Robinson’s astonishing body of work). Deepest gratitude to Elizabeth for the gift and inspiration of her poetry and other writings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barbara Tomash is the author of the poetry collections PRE- (Black Radish 2018), Arboreal (Apogee 2014), The Secret of White (Spuyten Duyvil 2009), Flying in Water, winner of the 2005 Winnow First Poetry Award, and two chapbooks, Of Residue (Drop Leaf 2022) and A Woman Reflected (palabrosa 2022). Her writing has recently been a finalist for The Dorset Prize, the Test Site Poetry Prize, Colorado Prize, and the Black Box Poetry Prize, and a semi-finalist for the POL Prize, the Tenth Gate Prize, and the Philip Levine Prize. Before her creative interests turned her toward writing she worked extensively as a multimedia artist. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions and Conjunctions Online Exclusives, New American Writing, Verse, VOLT, OmniVerse, and numerous other journals. She lives in Berkeley, California, and teaches in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.