“Armed with intelligence, valor, audacity, and grace, Max Ritvo’s imagination pushes back against one grim reality after another in its insistence on celebrating being embodied in the first place. No poet I can think of undertakes the transmutation of suffering into art with anything resembling Ritvo’s wild theatricality, inclusiveness, and tonal range. Dizzying, out of proportion, poundingly felt, fantastical, fanatical, urgently constructed, confessional, gaudy, absurd, mystic, harrowing—the fact that Ritvo’s work can be described in so many ways is testament to its complexity. The fact that we can never quite describe it in full is evidence of its irreplaceability. The fact that it haunts so many of its readers is proof that it has already become a necessary and sustaining part of us—some measure of our acquired wisdom, some portion of our vision of what it means to be alive.”

—TIMOTHY DONNELLY

Dedication

to my master, to my wife, to my mother,

to my fathers, to my sisters, to my nephew,

to my teachers, to my friends, to my exes,

to my shrinks, and to my doctors

Part 1

1

Living It Up

LIVING IT UP

The bed is on fire, and are you laughing?

You leave the bed

and leave me without thought.

The springs want to embrace each other

but they’re afraid if they break

their spiral, they will never

be able to hold anyone.

I wish you would let me know

how difficult it is to love me.

Then I would know you love me

beneath all that difficulty.

You are tending not only to me, you tell me,

but to your other child—the air,

and air puts his feet in my slippers,

and air scrubs his teeth on my brush,

and we must learn to share a bed,

we must learn to share a body.

The money is running out.

We will have to split one needle

this winter—one end for me,

one end for air.

The Curve

THE CURVE

Something, call it X, wanted a body

so it made our bodies.

But our bodies weren’t right for it—

gum around the bones,

a rash of gold or black,

eyes like blisters

leaking fondness.

*

X realized all animal bodies were like this, so it made language.

*

Language forced X into the body

like carbonation into a soda.

When I hear the word rock,

a translucent lump

shimmers in front of the world.

To its right, a piece of glass cuts a clear finger,

and to its left, there pulses a rocky, low, cold crust.

*

Though the images

vary exhaustingly and troublingly,

I always remember

the spoke of earth

cutting into the ocean

we saw from above, on a bicycle ride,

the sheen of the bicycles

spreading over the earth,

distinct from the ocean’s sheen.

The sheens alarmingly similar to one another

to be so close together—like two bodies making love.

*

We imagine a vertical meadow

complicated into our world needlessly