A Scarf Is A Sure Sign.

Posted March 25, 2008 2 Comments by AMY KING

The title poem of my next book I thought was submitted somewhere. I think I was wrong. Now it’s nowhere but here. It starts and ends with a scarf, just in time for this blustery New York City-Brooklyn winter descent — any publishers want it assuming I don’t discover it’s submitted somewhere between now and then?

___________________

I’M THE MAN WHO LOVES YOU

The history of the scarf is in knots and I don’t know
if that’s a compliment or a fact-finding gesture,
which is often mistaken for the moist point where
things turn damp and snowy and we get worked up over tiny
cold mishaps such as who jumped in front of our toy cars
racing through puddles or why
has the muffin meant for breakfast grown from stale into hard—
I originally meant to throw that sentence away
before retreating to my Guggenheim grotto on the planet, Manhattan ,
but over the connection of orphans,
my birthday hesitates—some stars are just too large
to orbit and prohibit from the subways of free speech just
as it turns out, we inhabit an invalid country, one that once
belonged to another people who never claimed to own it
anyway, I named my dog for the future except
I couldn’t remember what we’d all been calling her by then,
and as such, the bias of time takes over our mental conditions:
I began this day by celebrating the hour of my conception
and a simultaneous abandonment of complete non-existence;
I put on my long black dream and stepped into the world of women
to live among my female brothers who know how to grow
up on ink that occasionally vanishes & candles that eat at the wick;
I understood then not to let the germs that occupy my body
infiltrate my mind because they are programmed to dislodge
the thoughts that set me apart as a matter of defining my essence,
that aspect of personhood that surpasses stuffing wads
of cash into every pocket while pretending nothing’s wrong here;
I put myself into this box of unerased sentences,
I live in a box that lives in a drawer with arrows pointing
out the professor then female then southern parts of me
on initial examination of a body and accompanying biography,
a series of transparent confessions turns most of my lovers off,
so does this type of artificial language, though I adhere
in something of a masculine vein that can be coaxed open but
is more often dilated then narrowed into a permanent voice-style
for example, I like tissue, Kleenex, less so bargain paper, even rougher
are the paper towels that attempt the same job exactly,
which varies in thickness and color depending on income and location,
but maybe I should look at something that’s not as much me
as it gropes towards you: your heart’s been wounded before this time,
a vice grip holds it in place and no super-sized machete will
pry it loose to be used as the birdie in badminton on Sir Newton’s
back lawn, across which the Chinese woman collects cans all night,
each night, overnight, in my neighborhood,
I watch her distance from my third floor window
since she’s the closest I’ve ever come to understanding
a human being in the measure of a scarf that shares its warmth
to the degree of tight to loosely tied around her
open neck and also as a mask for her nose against eternal elements.

Amy King

________________

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Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) Award. Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She co-edited with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She also co-edits the anthology series, Bettering American Poetry, and is a professor of creative writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.