Sestina   Marci Nelligan

after Hieronymus Bosch There’s no there there, no here here— a timetable shows the missing trains, the fruit bowl longs for oranges. We went ahead to lurch behind, booked a passage so circuitous it carves new dimensions in the tabletops. They’ve posted soldiers in the laundromats and everything you want Irradiates to dust. I wanted to become a different human, left myself here among the daisies, tied the horse to a newell post and let him nibble all the oranges. Sweet tongue to the fruit, sweet agronome—carve statues out of butter to venerate the cows—your books with all their fractured mirrors, diminish me, bookend this life with the twin ghosts of hollowness and want. Among all the things we might have carved into trees or out of marble, not a single effigy captures the here of our simplicity, the rolling hips of fields, the slutty orange of trees that turn on you each fall. Whereas a fence is made of posts the country’s made of crosses and we post death threats on the clothesline flapping with the sheets. I thought         a good book could solve it all, the proper smile. Yet tyranny wears orange trappings, a mine fire, a deposition. I want something to put my body in, I want to feel the here- and-now draw its tongue along my neck, carve a cuneiform instruction manual in my shoulder blades, make me         a carved idol for this new century of cosmic meltdown. Write this on a Post-it note and affix it to the future: “Here lies the history of America, one big comic book of medical interventions.” There’s a way to want that’s simple as our minds. There’s an orange    sun fatter than the sky, an orange demon on a blitzkrieg mission to barbeque oblivion. Carve me a corner I might hole up in, give way to what you want and want for nothing. All we have are postage stamps from foreign places, an attic full of musty yarn. Strike a         matchbook to it all, flee the scene and we were never there. I want so many things for us, post my hopes on a telephone pole         like lost puppies but the book is here, our names carved from its narrative—all lost,         all devastation. Peel and pith the orange holds its essence in its skin. Peel and pith         its bitterness, too.            Copyright © 2020 by Marci Nelligan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 17, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.