Christopher Phelps - Two Poems

Fey

I love that word. It might be my favorite monosyllable, how it survives against all connotations of affected, or more to the pointed finger, “disordered in the mind (as one about to die),” “of excitement that presages death,” as if this dig could be applied to such light or lightened spirits. Spirits almost elsewhere, almost away from the trod, the treadmill, the traditional trudge; all the tr-words that trees welcome one back from. Back from trying the world and finding: it lacks feyth, or call it fidelity to any happiness that can get away with itself; get away from itself; get away from you.

Purlieu

1

If it’s in or out, I’d prefer to be shut in.

Who wouldn’t rather have somewhere they belong?

Answer: A claustrophobe, or an attachment style

like a squeezed edamame pod. A pod with legs.

A question (in a shout, from half a life away):

What’s the name for the edge of the forest?—

the words neither leading nor trailing off.

The blur of leaves that reach a sideways sky.

One side a bower, a nest of nests, the other

an open-air bazaar, except empty, at the moment;

where the earth is naked, in places, the groundcovers

get a little nervous about the sun.

About taking over, there, where the forest

doesn’t have the floor. Where the flit of birds

can get momentum. While in the bower,

it’s one branch, in view, at a time. I think

that’s it, purlieu, the difference between you

and a clean knife’s edge. Between you

and a just-mown lawn. Your mowed

regrets without debts, your saplings sipped,

your thorns tipped, and no designs that don’t

serve life directly. Challenge life directly.

2

Soyboy I was, milkman I proudly remain—

a stripling, at heart. And where the bark

got thick, a tendency to stir.

True, if I could choose, I’d choose to live

in a greenhouse with furniture, cranked-open

panes, with a place dry enough for fire

near where I keep my books. So that

it’s never not my task to keep

the separations delicate:

wooden shelves from mildew,

morning dew from honey,

all the books from flames.

In my own patio patois, own toes

and tongue having touched,

I’d call to the birds outside

my habitat: Borges, is that you?

Is it sound of me to speak to you

about my bizarre, un-potted,

down-rooted, upstarted plants?

A role in the play of a life made up

for feelings: for tendrils, blossoms,

and pitchers, the whole Nepenthes

on one side; on the other, an annual grove

finding its own groove, own radicles,

own microclimate, own green gown

grown as bare grass, unembarrassed

to want things this way, seaming

halves of one whole breath that is

welcome as the hair in a brush

(made of hair). Welcome

as a blush of watercolor skin

meeting suncolor skin

for whatever’s farther in. Welcome

to what leans instead of lies.

And welcome home, purlieu,

in lieu of a cling or a grip,

the purchase of leaves that stay, these

tough and tender vines and stems that clasp;

that last, growing up and around

themselves, each other with themselves,

in their own cells but out of their cells

others may prefer them in. Locked

in or out, in or out: always the choice

of the sorters in charge, at large.

Not here, so much, except for the autist

who will not fully recover from what is

not precisely an error. Eros, this house

welcomes you as you are. Come well

or however you can. Come

here, to a paracosm prepared (as every leaf

leaves when it will) and unprepared

(as each step inside could be a slip of feet

into the mouth of a pitcher); left open

for whatever mood in us comes next.

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Christopher Phelps lives in Santa Fe, where he teaches himself and others math and allied mysteries. Queer and neuroqueer, autistic and aphantasiac, these twainbows overhang and

underwrite his creative steadfascination. The author of the poetry collections, Cosmosis and Word Problems, he has poems in Beloit Poetry Journal, Boston Review, Broken Lens, Does It Have Pockets, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, and Poetry Magazine, among other journals. A chapbook, Tremblem, exists as a secret item.