Two Poems by Marlys West

How Much of This Is Water?

When I marry the lord of the pear
(Turkish translation)
he will put me in water up to my
what?
At night
I will be a soft rose.  Russian for, “blooms
in springtime when tendrils curl once
around the lower ficus limbs.”

In the white gown I grow shy, just like
when I was a girl,
which was never.
I could not get away from our guests
in that dress.  Everywhere you go
a spectacle.  Here she comes.  

When I marry bergamot, fruit that makes
Earl Gray tea
smell like an orange on fire and a lemon
in love, how will I label my happiness?
Poppy for put your foot down.

Here is the flower like an orange bell.

What I love is the face in my hands but not
the constant repertoire of sound.  

The sigh and the yawn.  The rub of the eye
and whoosh of the sit down.  I do not like
that alphabet but because it is mine
thus beloved.  I love the hem

and its haw.  I love the old black-lettered
system none of us forget past the alphabet
song.  The years are long and citrus oil
will burn
the skin I have heard but today I hardly
hear a word.

In sickness and in health.
We know what we are in for now.
The mortal coil and her bouquet.

The liver is the biggest internal organ
and the only one capable of some
rejuvenation.  When the body turns yellow

as a sun and the whites of the eyes bloom
into buttercups,
the kind that look a little wet.

In June, the white dress.  In June the dress.
When he puts his hand on his chest
like young Napoleon.
When the water behind
us tilts itself back and forth from the bodies
inside.

So then you know children
are in the pool.  Perhaps we have had them.

Code

What I meant to say, what I intend,
how I see this, or better yet:
the thing is.
What I want to say and so forth.
The boat behind the shed.
A wide, bare row where
the boat rested all winter,
that is how I felt.  After all these years and nothing.  

What I mean is to find meaning.
How much I want a silver canoe.
All summer I thought I would slip through water
with little effort and it would make me good.

How hard the hip where the skin silvers over,
soft part beneath like bread.
What I intend has no idea it is intended.
To be beloved.  To be a bottom rib nestled
in a body.

Here we are, warm and wet.  What I mean to say
versus the arm.  Versus the leg.  What I intend
versus the water running cold through my body.  

It’s hormones.  The boat behind the shed empty
as a bowl but for the spiders.  Not empty.
What I intend.
How I see this.  The eyes rolling up because
a warm day calls the body down to the grass,
the bed, here we are, again.  What I mean to say.  

What I intend.  This one.  That one.
What I meant to see: railway spine.
When the train cannot stop and it cannot stop.  

Car bones.
When the first husband nearly dies
and the second comes to you wearing wool clothes.
Soldier heart: the cardiac result of twig snap
and engine sputter.  The bird flutter, black-
eared bobcat in every woods.  What I mean
to say I whisper

in a little voice that comes from some buried
organ.  The liver musing over three glasses
of alcohol, the brain in fog, legs moving
back and forth, back and forth, they don’t say:
‘we are walking,’ but that is what happens.
Kidneys filter
but do not sing their work in words, not exactly.
There is no chorus that starts with, out potassium.

Toxins come out the way salt leaves a pocket,
for example.  For instance.
My intentions all over the map, the alphabet intends
something or other.   Elsewhere we numbered
the words and their thousand meanings.
If only, I wrote.  If then.    

Marlys West lives and works as a nurse in Los Angeles.  Her work has appeared in numerous journals and collections.  She is a Hodder Fellow and NEA grant recipient. The University of Akron Press published her first book of poems, and she is currently editing a second collection and writing fiction.