2 Poems by Cynthia Cruz
Fragment: Small Talk on Melancholia
In Lars von Trier’s film, Melancholia, Kirsten Dunst’s
character, Justine, tries to keep one step ahead of it.
You can see this in the first half of the film
where, at her own wedding, she keeps moving.
From room to room, guest to guest, through
the many rooms of her sister’s mansion
as if moving back in time to her own beginning
until, in the end, she finally collapses. Moving through
rooms and rooms of the mansion like endless
rooms of memory. And what is it
she collapses into? She loses herself inside a kind of small death,
not unlike what happens when one eats sweets, or dreams,
or the moment when an idea enters the mind. Her madness
is no madness, it is a reprieve, a tiny sleep, a space
she forms out of nothing, and then enters, an in-between.
Where do I go when I drop into sleep? Where
does my mind vanish into?
When I tasted the cake I went away for a small moment,
I was erased. I entered something else, a next-to
world. Or, when I leave the body and lose time
in thought. It is the body that leads me,
though I always want to anchor myself in the mind.
Justine wants to leave the world she lives in—
its small rules and hard corners. It isn’t death
she envisions, but a tiny collapse, a din to drop into.
Death, or eating, a dream, or what happens
when, animal-like, one feels one’s body,
the centering mechanism of the body,
pulling to someone else’s, magnetic, spectral,
not of this world. A small blur. a move, but
infinitesimal, like a yawn, but barely.
Like music, when you first heard it, indiscernible,
when it happens, like that.
Milkweed Lullaby
The days were endless,
magical.
The violence, a golden thread
stitched through everything.
We played horses.
I chose the most
delicate, the most
dangerous. And at night
ice cream and birthday
cake, a riot
of tiny white flowers.
Bright paper masks
to hide the mind behind.
At the edge of what
I can not ever
remember—
Plumbago, lantana, trumpet-
vine. A glorious magenta
bougainvillea.
I don’t think she had a good friend,
animals, maybe.
We never left the house
and were raised
in absolute and utter
isolation.
Animals.
People coming in the summer
to visit. And never
came back.
And in darkening weather
I cower inside the yellowing
field, listening—
I am crawling
the long corridor
back to the room
where the shattering
begins.
Cynthia Cruz is the author of six collections of poems. Hotel Oblivion, her seventh, is forthcoming in the spring of 2022 with Four Way Books. Disquieting: Essays on Silence, a collection of critical essays exploring the concept of silence as a form of resistance, was published by Book*hug in 2019. The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class, an examination of Freudian melancholia and the working class, was published by Repeater Books in 2021. Cruz is currently at work on a book exploring Hegelian negative freedom and the working class and is also pursuing a PhD at the European Graduate School, where her area of research is psychoanalysis and philosophy.
7 February 2022
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