Sandra Beasley's "Small Kingdom"

It is the day after Thanksgiving. There was no turkey. But there were magic tricks. And whiskey. I made my signature dish of kale& butternut squash over herbed polenta with blue cheese crumbles& pomegranate seeds with a drizzle of balsamic fig reduction. The reduction alone takes two hours (while I stir and watch old X-Files on Netflix) and makes me smell wonderful. 

Now it's black Friday and I am still in my bed mulling over a dream of margaritas and buttery nipples on the topside of a cruise ship. I have never been on a cruise, though sometimes that three-hour ferry to Vancouver Island feels like it should count as one. No buffet. 

This morning I finished (re)reading (every time I come to this book I come to it new) Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone With Lungs and I finished reading Lisa Jarnot's Black Dog Songs, which is incantatory in its sounds and repetitions, a book I am sure I will return to for this, but never in its entirety. I have also been paging through The Arcadia Project while thinking about what models I may use for the class I'm teaching at the Hugo House next week on ecopoetics. 

For now though I've turned to Sandra Beasley's Theories of Falling. I have only read Beasley's poems in journals and always liked them. Then her work came up at a dinner with somany poets a few weeks ago (initially in relation to allergies) and so last week while perusing a friend's shelves I decided to borrow her two books of poems and overall am finding I like them very much.

SMALL KINGDOM

Who doesn't love a small kingdom?


The lion has her pride, the mole


her starnosed tunnel. My mother


grows three kinds of basil, and I


collect movie stubs in a box marked


Memories. A whelk knows only

the golden ratio of its chambers,


the figure 8 of nerve endings—


drawbridge mantle, moat ocean.


Washed up, its perfect enclosure


reeks of salt. I sort by color.


I file by coast. I know a man

by the cans and coffee cups


he leaves in his car, the thick


puppy mess of him. Who doesn't


dream of cleaning out her small


kingdom, tilting the whole stable


on its Augean edge? Who doesn't love

the disaster of her own making?


Boy, give up your slow reach


before I try to fix your life, before


I let your shell jangle to dust


in my pocket, before I burn


your operculum gate for incense.

I don't know how to keep you


without killing you a little—the way


my mother pares down the rosemary


each year to keep its flavor bright.


The way we must make all loves smaller


before they can enter our kingdom.