Grief Work by Natalie Diaz

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend April 21, 2015   Grief Work   Natalie Diaz

I have gazed the black flower blooming her animal eye. Gacela oscura. Negra llorona.   Along the clayen banks I follow her-astonished, gathering grief’s petals she lets fall like horns.   Why not now go toward the things I love?   Like Jacob’s angel, I touched the garnet of her wrist, and she knew my name. And I knew hers— it was Auxocromo, it was Cromóforo, it was Eliza. It hurtled through me like honeyed-rum.   When the eyes and lips are touched with honey what is seen and said will never be the same.   Eve took the apple in that ache-opened mouth, on fire and in pieces, from the knife’s sharp edge.   In the photo her fist presses against the red-gold geometry of her thigh. Black nylon, black garter, unsolvable mysterium—I have to close my eyes to see.   Achilles chasing Hektor round the walls of Ilium three times. How long must I circle the high gate above her knees?   Again the gods put their large hands in me, move me, break my heart like a clay jar of wine, loosen a beast from some darklong depth—   my melancholy is hoofed. I, the terrible beautiful Lampon, a shining devour-horse tethered at the bronze manger of her collarbones.   I do my grief work with her body—labor to make the emerald tigers in her hips leap, lead them burning green to drink from the violet jetting her.   We go where there is love, to the river, on our knees beneath the sweet water. I pull her under four times until we are rivered. We are rearranged.   I wash the silk and silt of her from my hands— now who I come to, I come clean to, I come good to.            Copyright © 2015 by Natalie Diaz. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “My friend and I call grief the beautiful terrible because it is a wound that opens you but also shows you the miracles of what is inside you. Rather than try to escape my griefs, I’m trying to recognize them as a wildness I can submerge myself in, to be washed clean by the very thing that aches me so deeply. To give my grief to a beloved’s body, to take her grief into my body, to rearrange ourselves with it and become both more and less of one another and of our own selves—this is a lucky thing.” — Natalie Diaz   Natalie Diaz is the author of When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). She teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Residency MFA Program in Santa Fe, New Mexico.   Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths Most Recent Book by Diaz   When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) "The sun rears" by Jennifer Bartlett "A Horse Grazes in My Shadow" by Matt Rasmussen "Hum" by Ann Lauterbach Read This Poem   For National Poetry Month, we’ve teamed up with 826 National to produce Read This Poem, a celebration of poets in cities with 826 chapters. Read this week’s featured poems by poets from Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038