Cover

PRAISE FOR MAX RITVO’S FOUR REINCARNATIONS

“In Four Reincarnations, Max Ritvo brings us along where poetry needs to go; away from the small confessional and into a big world of death, love, and metaphysics. While allowing for the possibility of a confessional mode in the details, Ritvo’s poems take stock of the nineteenth-century sublime, adding the contemporary death of God, and going forward with bravery, irony, and the most compassionate sense of humor. The relationship he hews between language and the body is both original and hard won. His lyric complicity is between self, dedicatee, reader, and world. Ritvo’s ear for language is beautiful, as is his spirit. His poems defy solipsism and enter a cosmology of unconditional love. How lucky I am that I found Max Ritvo and his poetry; he makes me love poetry again.”

—SARAH RUHL

“This is poetry written in the dark light of dying young. You feel the truth of this poetry too deeply to want to talk about it in your own words. You want to give it to other people still back here in health, to say to them, ‘Here: the earthly gift of this poet of genius, Max Ritvo.’ To Ritvo himself, we might say what he says to his wife in one of these poems: ‘Thou art me before I am myself.’ In the sense not of death, but of most ardent life.”

—JEAN VALENTINE

“If you could confect a numinous cauldron and stir into it the lumens of Christopher Smart’s Spiritual Musick, the spirit-hounds of Hopkins’s ‘terrible crystals,’ the hysteria of Monty Python’s antics, the grace and depth of Keats’s early wisdoms, you would render incarnate the first and final book of Max Ritvo’s, Four Reincarnations. The poems flicker like fireflies let loose from their captivity in a mason jar, fulgurating like Nobodaddy’s business. Somehow, somewhere, Ritvo must have begun as an infant scholar, a prodigy, a young man of the rarest and most prescient gifts. This is a dazzling collection, rife with life, and with death, impending. This book, then, will be the afterlife. Ritvo’s work is extracelestial, riddled with brilliance and with ecstasies. We are lucky to have this luminous collection in our world. It will go on. And then on.”

—LUCIE BROCK-BROIDO

“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

but complication is all X ever wanted for us.

We misunderstand purity. This is purity.

*

I am your lover and X’s.

I am too good a lover

to ever be bored:

Skinny, hairy-chested,

made of pellets of rice,

cheeping in a way that’s

endearing and inappropriate,

confused, surprised at the confusion,

surprised at the surprise,

and so on, very tiringly, so on.

The Senses

THE SENSES

Everything feels so good to me:

my wool hat,

the cocoon of dryness in my throat.

The sound of burning vegetables

is like a quiet, clean man folding sheets.

But I keep having thoughts—

this thought always holding at bay the next thought

until it sours into yet

another picture of dissatisfaction

that loves to be thought,

another pear, ugly

as the head

of a man who is thinking.

I thought my next thought would be a vision of my suffering;

I thought I would understand the yellow lightning in a painted storm—

the crucial way it disappears

when I imagine myself flung

headlong into the painting.

Instead I have this picture of dissatisfaction,

the thought not rising, but splitting in half

on the unanswered question of lightning,

my mind

like a black glove

you mistake for a man

in the middle of a blizzard.

Holding a Freshwater Fish in a Pail above the Sea

HOLDING A FRESHWATER FISH IN A PAIL ABOVE THE SEA

He strips health out

of the water,

reminding me

of my mother.

I walk in sea

and hold my sweet

fish above me,

no small feat

given the rice-

hard salt scraping

my eyeballs twice

each blink of lid.

I put the pail

in the ocean

and then unveil

the decorous

frail, white-eyed koi.

But the salt, I

think, will destroy

his rocking breath.

Where he wants space

he will get salt.

Where key traces

of the silence

should hang inside

his cathedral

of musical

blood—

Instead, delicious

crystal drills

will crack it all

open; the church,

its ebbs and flows.

I scoop the fish

up by its nose,

a forked affair.

I show you him.

Looks fine to me

you say (Ha!), dim

and lovely you.

This happens more

times, stopping and

starting, me showing

you my full hand,

my fish. Where have

you gone? I was

hoping to wake

from this dream

with you drawing

the curtains, a gold

glow on the sheet

wrapping me up.

You aren’t here

but I’m aware

that somewhere

you have moved.

The Watercolor Eulogy

THE WATERCOLOR EULOGY

for Melissa Carroll

When you leave my mind,

the last piece of you to leave

is your hands.

When you go to the earth

the last part of you visible

above what is either sand or clay

isn’t a hand, but a glowing shroud.

The black goose

with your name in its throat

and my name in its stomach

will cough you up with her hoots:

part jelly, part watch,

part bone, part me,

part power.

There is a dead language buried in English.

There is a word no one remembers

for a temple

with a bowl of millet sealed

in each brick.

When you are buried, the word

will grow a ssa sound.

Its meaning will change

to specify you as the builder.

No one can speak the language you will rewrite.

I know this isn’t the heaven we wanted.

What ever is?

And soon I’ll join you

amid the terms

for tiny bottles of defunct potions

and no longer understood passions

and together we’ll bury

our own particular I love you.

I wouldn’t mind its being sealed off with us, in our brick of earth.

Hi, Melissa

HI, MELISSA

I have spoken to you of heaven—

I simply meant the eyes are suns that see.

Seeing is the faces’ nervous delicious Lord.

Listening to you makes me naked.

When I kiss your ankle I am silencing an oracle.

The oracle speaks from the hill of your ankle.

Poem to My Litter

POEM TO MY LITTER

My genes are in mice, and not in the banal way

that Man’s old genes are in the Beasts.

My doctors split my tumors up and scattered them

into the bones of twelve mice. We give

the mice poisons I might, in the future, want

for myself. We watch each mouse like a crystal ball.

I wish it was perfect, but sometimes the death we see

doesn’t happen when we try it again in my body.

My tumors are old, older than mice can be.

They first grew in my flank a decade ago.

Then they went to my lungs, and down my femurs,

and into the hives in my throat that hatch white cells.

The mice only have a tumor each, in the leg.

Their tumors have never grown up. Uprooted

and moved. Learned to sleep in any bed

the vast body turns down. Before the tumors can spread

they bust open the legs of the mice. Who bleed to death.

Next time the doctors plan to cut off the legs

in the nick of time so the tumors will spread.

But I still have both my legs. To complicate things further,

mouse bodies fight off my tumors. We have to give

the mice AIDS so they’ll harbor my genes peacefully.

I want my mice to be just like me. I don’t have any children.

I named them all Max. First they were Max 1, Max 2,

but now they’re all just Max. No playing favorites.

They don’t know they’re named, of course.

They’re like children you’ve traumatized

and tortured so they won’t let you visit.

I hope, Maxes, some good in you is of me.

Even my suffering is good, in part. Sure I swell

with rage, fear—the stuff that makes you see your tail

as a bar on the cage. But then the feelings pass.

And since I do absolutely nothing (my pride, like my fur,

all gone) nothing happens to me. And if a whole lot

of nothing happens to you, Maxes, that’s peace.

Which is what we want. Trust me.

Dawn of Man

DAWN OF MAN

After the cocoon I was in a human body

instead of a butterfly’s. All along my back

there was great pain—I groped to my feet

where I felt wings behind me, trying

to tilt me back. They succeeded in doing so

after a day of exertion. I called that time,

overwhelmed with the ghosts of my wings, sleep.

My thoughts remained those of a caterpillar—

I took pleasure in climbing trees. I snuck food

into all my pains. My mouth produced language

which I attempted to spin over myself

and rip through happier and healthier.

I’d do this every few minutes. I’d think to myself

What made me such a failure?

It’s all a little touchingly pathetic. To live like this,

a grown creature telling ghost stories,

staring at pictures, paralyzed for hours.

And even over dinner or in bed—

still hearing the stories, seeing the pictures—

an undertow sucking me back into myself.

I’m told to set myself goals. But my mind

doesn’t work that way. I, instead, have wishes

for myself. Wishes aren’t afraid

to take on their own color and life—

like a boy who takes a razor from a high cabinet,

puffs out his cheeks, and strips them bloody.

Black Bulls

BLACK BULLS

My mind is

three black bulls on

three hills of sand, far apart.

My loved ones

sleep in clay hollows.

If I turn from you, you will go back

to your clay hollow.

The aqueducts of the city of my language

clot with lather.

The world is bad

and I am bad.

Three black bulls on three hills

of sand are stretching apart

the sheet of my language, crawling with ants.

This is the basis

upon which we seek company:

I am bad,

the world is bad.

Three black bulls stomp the hills of sand

into blistered glass.

Their hooves swelter against these

wrong bells.

I am so sorry that you have come to this mind of mine.

Part 2

2

For Crow

FOR CROW

We tended to a crow,

and now it’s fine.

It shakes its head, and eats crickets,

forgetful bird

that you put in a pouch to make sleep.

They said his eyes were blue because he was young.

Black blurs the eyes of crows as they grow old—

all motion

disruption in a lake of light.

I am a crow, and

I think you are mostly a pattern of motion

and I am a leaf—and your hands fan under

and over me, and create a little space

in which the thing in my life that adds up

is my motion.

I think you can be traced

most easily by the echoes of your kinetics, my love.

Your lips, neck, arms,

these are not a harbor;

the you-around-you is the harbor.

In our bed, in the dark,

it is not sound, not outline,

but the motion of you

that brings to the surface of my body

all of the apparentness

of a settling glass of muddy water.

How I feel is then forgotten,

and instead I find myself

moving, joy, moving!

To Randal, Crow-Stealer, Lord of the Greenhouse

TO RANDAL, CROW-STEALER, LORD OF THE GREENHOUSE

I master the technology to make bricks.

I build altars clumped with fire.

I am not afraid to light

a flower and destroy her beauty;

the crispy flower has been taken to a godly feast.

Do you pity my imagination? It will kill you.

My mother will kill you.

She is my imagination.

I am a leather horse, and my mother is riding me.

You are a man: alert, passionate.

You sit in an almond of glossy hair.

You are capable of being persuaded by fine argument.

You even smile eagerly when convinced.

Remember what a great time we had in the first stanza?

And now this: me blubbering to mommy

over your brilliance.

Tell me what it’s like to be you. Well Max,

imagine if you stayed

by your bricks after your sacrifice

until your body warmed them.

It’s called being indoors, and it’s a good first step.

I’d die of thirst!

Imagine prying fingers through the bricks,

making tunnels your mind first saw as ghosts.

Imagine pressing your lips to the pipes

and sipping dew from the outside.

You are exquisitely sensitive.

I imagine defecating over your eyebrows: a unibrow.

And what about my godly flower? You still haven’t accounted for that!

I inhale the flower’s smoke, and it allows me to control every inch of

my body,

and a little man emerges: this is called being possessed.

I dance out here, trouserless on the salt flat, dazzled by hail,

because every gesture perfects my body

into the little man’s happy home.

You have no flowers in your indoor dark, fireless Randal!

Max, I have invented glass, through which the sun may light my flowers.

One of these days you’ll be stable enough to make a woman happy,

and that will go a long way.

*

The secret to making people happy, Randal,

I call at your departing, shiny suit,

is that I am the people!

Sky-Sex Dreams of Randal

SKY-SEX DREAMS OF RANDAL

I am raving at you

with extremely good eye contact.

I fancy, lovely, that there are many drains

to circle.

Look at me and bore me,

bore me good and flaccid.

That’s right, now I’m in a getup,

dressed like a palm-tree lady—hula skirt, the whole shebang.

I have reached the end of suffering

and sat on the dark porch:

On the white ledge, a spider throws up the fat

of a bee.

Three white wood chairs in the mud,

a glass-topped table sealed into

a knot of pampas grass.

The chairs watching shadows on the glass top

like white poodles, all named Handsome,

from different phases of your life,

watching television pictures of your sex dreams play out.

Sob, elf.

Yelp, gnome, of the end.

Stalking My Ex-Girlfriend in a Pasture

STALKING MY EX-GIRLFRIEND IN A PASTURE

In the beginning, the Worldly Winds

portioned us hides of equal thickness.

But then one day my ex’s glossy vagina spoke.

The breath came from inside—

a womb-rung bell of molten gold

unfed by the Winds:

You are a cart that I can teach to be two bicycles.

I wetted my hands in her

and her eyebrows and smile made a circuit in her face;

she described an orgasm

so imaginatively that I longed to become her.

She instructed me to unyoke the mind and body

so that the mind could speak

as the body came

but I split wrong. Only my mind split—

into an array of sirens with

show tunes played in between them.

Or maybe it was only my body

and that is why I am naked and bloody.

I want to dress to the nines—

to wear a navy tuxedo

with a white chrysanthemum in the lapel.

Then I can approach her,

submit her body to the operations

of the gods, expose her

bell to the Winds,

and take back the hide she took

to be the sheet

on my eternal sickbed.

*

I refuse the doctor’s fizzy tincture

because each bubble is me

until it pops on my tongue

and then it’s you.

Mommy Harangues Poor Randal

MOMMY HARANGUES POOR RANDAL

Money is self-comprehending,

take a hard look in the mirror,

your brow is brutal, your teeth are for meat,

your eyes are globes and hunched beneath them

is my ghost who blinks them shut, who pulls out

your tears, I’m finished. We’re finished.

Go outside and play, but if you come

knocking on my door when you’re done

don’t be surprised if I say Who’s there?

And if you keep pushing, and dare

name yourself, here’s a warning—

they call it a punch line because I punch you

in the fucking face if you step over the line.

Lyric Complicity for One

LYRIC COMPLICITY FOR ONE

I wanted to speak with a woman

so passionately and imaginatively that our personalities

would dissolve, we would begin to lie,

and a thing between us

much more beautiful than either of our voices

would begin to speak—a lyric complicity.

Instead, imagine a fisherman

rubbing hot water on his throat.

His mother once said

gargle hot water when your throat’s tight.

He can’t remember the word gargle in the memory,

only his mother fanning out her fingers as she said it,

small, precise, and a little wicked.

So now he gets it wrong, remembering the fingers, feeling forlorn.

Beneath him swim bluefin tuna at fifty miles an hour,

fast and invisible as the wicked fingers.

These sea-seams, these black-bodied cloaks of guts,

are just as dazed as the thoughts of the fisherman.

For every thought, a new fish soars

right under the anchored boat—

a lullaby to quiet another lullaby.

Part 3

3

Poem About My Wife Being Perfect and Me Being Afraid

POEM ABOUT MY WIFE BEING PERFECT AND ME BEING AFRAID

You chase my face with your face

by making my faces:

Your lips, right after mine, form a crescent

and wax and wane with all the moons

of my mouth.

You catch up and have my thoughts.

Your brain binds around mine, a gold gauze.

You have my thoughts faster than I can.

The mouth made from our lips

pours chilly water

out the pipe.

We go faster than I imagined

my mind built time or built itself.

I see behind the documents:

the gauze swelling with gold

blood into a halo.

Thou art me before I am myself.

When I Criticize You, I’m Just Trying to Criticize the Universe

WHEN I CRITICIZE YOU, I’M JUST TRYING TO CRITICIZE THE UNIVERSE

Why do you shit so much—is it cancer or anxiety?

I go to the bathroom to visit my ex-girlfriends.

They’re two lily pads, fire-white—one in the bath,

the other in the toilet—and they call me Kermit,

and beg Kermit to swim.

My body’s voices, normally so quarrelsome,

grow warm and weepy, and start

to sing together “Take Me to the Water.”

I thought I might sleep in the bathroom tonight.

Please don’t be mad, wife.

I’m not mad at you,

I’m mad at the universe unfolding in your body.

Can’t you think of me as a person?

Me seeing the universe in your body

is what makes you such a people person.

*

I went to the bathroom to sleep.

I dreamt two dreams—one inside the other—

The outer dream, a shell,

the deeper dream, a yolk.

In the yolk dream I was a horse—the dream broke,

I awoke, and I saw you driving the dream,

charioteer of my sleep.

Then the shell dream broke and I woke again,

my back stippled with tile, a scar of soap in my ear.

*

Beyond the door, in the realest bed,

I find you sleeping.

Your breast

is like the delicious voice

in the telephone.

Your bones when I bite too deep

are the phone’s wires,

full of voice, blue marrow.

Poem in Which My Shrink Is a Little Boy

POEM IN WHICH MY SHRINK IS A LITTLE BOY

Pick which is yours, I say.

Wordlessly, you take the legal pad, his old legal pad,

from a glass table between us.

My excitement mounting,

I plunk down a block

of toffee, a box of Tic Tacs,

and a husk of Listerine PocketPak Breath Strips.

You reach for the Breath Strips, his Breath Strips.

Welcome back, Doc! What a strapping young lad

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