Emily Rosko

Limerence Ode

In the old photos, you’re leonine
and lean; you look like a pallbearer
in your pinstriped vest and suit, hands
in pockets, hair wind-tussled. (O Artemis!
guide my words, let them arrow
though the heart’s fibers and strike
a song). October was made for hungers: skin,
touch, fetch, color, breath. Boredom
of Tippecanoe County: mud-brown river and
farms glazed with pesticides, corn syrup
factories with burn-clouds of musk and the
manure the truckloads of pigs carry as they
go off to slaughter. Fields parceled in squares,
razed of green. Nowhere felt special unless it
felt untouched. I searched for things
overgrown with decay, anything odd,
anything flush with a wildness teetering
between danger and anemic beauty—those
gothic glories that pull us underground. I fed
an inward eye;
I dressed up what I could. The land’s flatness
possessed no drama: it was silos, feed
mills, water towers, post-war cement, interstate
all the way to the horizon. Each night the sun
plummeted faster, the sky
streaked orange with dust and toxins.

I knew nothing about you but swore
that I sensed your oncoming with a hunter’s
ear, knew you’d ripen the season of yawns and
stings. In the Midwest, hell was always waiting
for something to happen. I’d returned from
my parents’ house with a blistering smart
after the dead to me treatment my mother unleashed
upon seeing my new transformation. Bold,
I’d thought, to have the pixie cut I’d never dared
before. Bold, I’d thought, to not look like
the sweatshirt-clad, salon-blond Indiana
girls on repeat on campus. What did you do
to me? the fury lashed, as if my hair were hers.
Inadequate, all I could do was bury it
and act unaffected, though the seething
is there even now—it’s how I cover
the shame. I was no good
at knowing how to handle ugliness
or beauty. I felt to be both at once and so
blackened my eyes with charcoal makeup,
sunk into philosophy and poetry, as if
they could untarnish inheritances and the dull
heartland, as if books could chart a path

for escape. Look closer, the sweet black gum
trees pleaded, each vermillion leaf remaking
anguish to sun-gash. I was left on my own,
seeking who knows what and heeded advice
to catch the one remarkable event the region
was known for: the migration of hundreds of
sandhill cranes—black silhouettes gangly
and elegant, like hybrid demon-angels—
descending to earth at sundown to overnight

where the cornfields border wetlands.
An ancient compass imprinted within,
guiding them here each year to rest.
The coral sky stretched and split. Time
divided into multiples, wings downing
darkness, a prehistoric chorus
chanting to conjure winter.
Come closer.

Hear me out, this is supposed to be
about you. I’m trying to find my way back.
From tedium, you came: supernatural,
radiant, donning a feather boa
at the amateur art show I attended
with my Wiccan friend, you your Mormon.
Behold Adonis! Elaine teased, nudging me.
I approached and you took. So I took
you to my found sights—the cemetery
with the headless angel stone surrounded
by drying goldenrod; and later, Wolf Park,
where I swear the wolves wore human faces. One
afternoon, a railyard with rusted train cars by a
red brick warehouse: glass shards and cans, BB
pellets and ragweed. I brought you there, camera
in hand (Pentax, B&W, tripod). You, suited; me,
in a dress and platforms, hair spiked, part harpy
to your Hades. I set
the timer to join you. You stood still and fixed
out; me, caught forever in a turn to you. O
you were everything I wanted then and maybe
even now! In autumn’s smokey-quartz sky the
limestone bluffs glint with the promise
of something more beneath. After, at my place,
you undress, sit trembling bare on my bed, this
is me, here I am. I took you in, Plato-boy, your
chest’s breastbone, abdomen, ribs, shiver and
swelling. 

I know how this sounds, but it’s not that.
Skin-to-skin we slept. Nothing more.
How can I explain the newness then
of waking? The moon up, the stars reset
as if on debut by the cosmos. My whole life
I never belonged anywhere, always
tracked to the intrusive echo: unworthy,
unworthy, you are unworthy. Finally,
the earth exhaled and my body held
the first feelings of perfect rest.
You rose, then dressed, and hurried off
to where no new myths could find you.
Every word I spin tucks you further
back into that place of never and always.
And yet, I’ve not stopped since
then with trying to get back there.

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Emily Rosko is the author of three poetry collections: Weather Inventions (U Akron P 2018); Prop Rockery (U Akron P 2012); and Raw Goods Inventory (U Iowa P 2006). She co-edited A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (U Iowa P 2011). She is Professor of English at the College of Charleston and an editor at swamp pink.