Geisha Madrigal — Blackbird Archive

← v17n2, Fall 2018

Body is a temple, but who can read inside it?

Beneath sheets, a girl, flashlight pressed to palm:

that flanged red ghost deafened cicadas, traffic qualm,

with nervous, ungrateful hue. Is captured light

the subject, then? Or dark. Let in too much

& it’s the anti-lyric—oblivion galore.

Too little? Don’t bother to be born.

Light, meet Dark, in this intricate brocade

of sky freighting the stream, summer’s obi,

consciousness unraveling the heart’s claim.

Wade there, waterbird precarious, a drinking game.

Lift slowly the kimono drape of consonants.

Reveal your vowels. Not all of them. Arouse

the polluted miraculous water that we house.

body desire art

Lisa Russ Spaar

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author or editor of more than ten collections of poetry and criticism, including Orexia: Poems (Persea, 2017) and Monticello in Mind: 50 Contemporary Poems on Jefferson (University of Virginia Press, 2016). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Harvard Review , Kenyon Review , Literary Imagination , Pleiades , and The Yale Review . Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books , The New York Times , and The Washington Post . Spaar’s honors include a Rona Jaffe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. She is professor of English and creative writing at the University of Virginia.