Paradise

Liking abandonment, they leapt

With abandonment between day

And practical night. It could go on

Like this forever, Abby said

Indefinitely saying memorable

Things about forever. The things here

Were human and part

Human and human parts

Hands and half-snails and friends

You had known and abandoned or who

Themselves had abandoned

Themselves, or you, or the world

It didn’t matter: they were here now

With endless interesting things

To say about forever, being both

True and partial unto themselves forever.

The plant spines bent

Tethered and clicking their flowers out

One by one, then two by two

Or shot out of the ground like

New rockets. Flowers click

Against the air like coin

Melon, pastel, burgundy

Coin falling down forever

Sometimes on fire, sometimes

Liquid gold or cheaper

Stuff, liquid rock.

And on it went. Turning things

Under the ground and letting them

Rise up again purely themselves

Which is to say heavy, the pure

Heavy weight of themselves.

Not so they dragged

But so they remained tethered

Relative planets and canyons

Eons and rabbits and aspects and scales

Peeling from stars. Collapse

Down on me like a red silk

Sail, gestured Sorrow

I would like to disappear

And the turning things turned

Silken and fell all together.

Everyone—

Cratylus, Sorrow, Abby

And Emine—had drinks

And crackers while they waited.

They were waiting for everything that happens

In evening, when everything happens

At once, almost unbearably

Simultaneous things: a ball that

Bounces from an iron ring, everyone rising

In greeting, baby falls asleep

A delivery man skids on the damp

Street and a car honks, some people

Begin dancing, they can hear a beat

A window opens. Thank god

For change, Emine said

Let change be the measure

And move its slow feet. She said

Praise god, this

God of gin, god of towns, god of daffodils, of salads. Rabbits, seashells, bricks and bells. People,

bitumen, skies

And red skies, blue skies. Blue suns and green suns

And other suns. Land mine god. Strip mine god. Police god. God of tragedy. Exposition god.

Suburb god. Gesso god. Shovel god. Splinter god. God of difference. Mechanical god. God

of life

And god of death. Mine god. Praise this god.

The sky, cracked, a million small cracks

In the glaze. Hazing, the way mirrors did.

The god of chrome and dislocation

Clicked, who was god of the voices of flowers

And smiled like flowers smile

With the forms and colors fitting their natures.

No one forgot to like it, the pattern god

Seeming regular in the haphazard

Cracking, and it left no one cold. Nothing

But reason could rob anything of love.

The season shuddered heartbreakingly

Praising its god, who moved.

To this god nothing made sense.

It liked it that way.

So everyone ate their crackers, sometimes blindly

Reaching at the same time for the plate

Withdrawing their hand for another.

They knew what they were: a part of everything

And that everything together knows nothing blindly

And thanked themselves for their impartiality before

Blinking with surprise to know, to know

For a moment, their fingers brushing accidentally, over

Crackers, plate hazing over, under

Sky, or wiping the condensation from them

That came from cold glasses, wiping

Their wet fingers on hems. God! God

Left first, the lilacs clutched in.

Claire DeVoogd is a poet. Her first book is Via (Winter Editions, 2023). Her chapbook Apocalypses 1-12 was published with Belladonna in 2021. She co-edits Terrific Books, a fly-by-night chapbook press. Recent writing can be found in The Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, Pfeil Magazine, and Prelude.

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