Wet

Carolyn Creedon

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781612776880
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Winner of the 2011 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize
Edward Hirsch, Judge

"I'm moved by the way that Carolyn Creedon's work treats experience as sacred. She won't look away from difficult truths. She writes frankly about her own frustrations, longings, and heartbreaks, but she also recognizes the suffering of others—their secret grievances and griefs. The daily working world is here in full measure. And yet there's an oddly religious feeling that keeps breaking through this volume, which cherishes the small things, the lesser divinities, and ends with a prayer. It heartens me to welcome this fiery and fervent book, this wet collection, into the world."
—Edward Hirsch, Judge

"I have long admired Carolyn Creedon's work. Her first book is strong and vital. She is not like anyone else now publishing in our country.Her directness and immediacy make her a kind of legitimate granddaughter of the sublime Walt Whitman."
—Harold Bloom

"Gleaming wet with all the fluids of life—the 'high sweet sacrament that stank of blood and wine'—these astonishing poems defy us to separate the sacred from the profane, myths from the mundane, intellect from appetite. Language itself moves with a fluid energy, a breathtaking emotional velocity and formal dexterity, hot-wired by humor, fueled by hunger, cadence after cadence, as Creedon piles on the similes till the whole world wears her kind of trouble, her wild and brilliant apprehension."
—Eleanor Wilner

"Carolyn Creedon's first book is a red-hot blast of truth. Her wildly various poems are carefully cooked yet manage to be slyly and earnestly raw. 'I am the spilled-out impure grit, and the laundress of it, ' says the speaker in 'Stone.' Ever ballsy, Wet is also imbued with huge stabs of longing and precipitous tenderness. Whether in leaks or spurts or cataracts, this astonishing new voice holds nothing back."
—Ellen Doré Watson

III.

PIED BEAUTY

Glory be to the guy who invented Missouri for money,
with its plateglass heat, its thick-tressed storms,
its power outages, its broken water mains;
glory be to these broken-up brick stoops full of women who sit
calicoed, bandannaed, laughing and fanning at their men
making finger v-signs with light and dark roughened hands
who pull in from the Shop ’n Save and haul out silver bags of ice
from their Ford F-lines and pass them around;
glory be to Cedric’s Fish Fry for cooking up everything
over a lit trash can before it all goes bad, glory to the beer
to be drunk while it’s still cool, glory be to the E felony
of freeing the over-full hydrant, feeling the loose damp shirt
on the body; glory be to wearing nothing much, dancing with strangers,
glory be to somebody’s six-pack of D batteries, for the flashlights,
for the boom boxes blaring the bleats of poetry, a band called pain,
glory to the little girl with her doll tucked football-style under her arm,
its boy hair crisped sleek in the middle, two like waves meeting each to each,
glory to her mommy, whose feet hurt, who’s home now
whose love for this girl in this place makes her skin feel raw and soft;
glory for half a moon that haloes everybody the same this night
for the nest of debris and leaves we rest on, and later, in the hot dark,
while I wave a lazy magazine, glory to the found matches you touch
to our Jesus and Mary industrial candles, lighting up
your sweat-dabbed glorious face;

para que no me atormenten de nuevo sino que seamos salvajes en la gloria del espiritu santo.

Praise this.

WET 2. 0

I wanted to make this a wonderful class, I type to my kids,
but sadly, I have failed. I click Send. I should have learned long ago
never to write what is supposed to be an apology after two and a quarter
glasses of Vinho Verde—not to lovers or used-to-be’s and especially not
to a class of hopeful baby poets who spend their quiet time hunched over
wafer-sized Sony laptops thinking of new ways to say pussy when
it’s spring and they really should be out there getting their hands wet—
I should have said dirty.

DIRTY! You write in the margins of my manuscript,

all that piss and milk and menstrual fluid flooding the work. It bores me,

you write. Can’t you think of a more delicate way to express your femininity?

Sally forth and fuck each other, I want to say
to my roomful of students. Do it against a tree
with the new buds around, tiny as toes,
and the wet earth making room around your bodies,
but the professionality I have to put on along
with the uncomfortable pairs of panty hose
precludes me.

To you, though, I just want to say,
—again—cunt and titties and holes and woman.
Yeah, you, squatting in the margins, preferring
to talk of sacred amber and stone altar and Nijinsky,
croaking like a disapproving Canadian frog
with your cock and ball-point penmanship, I want to tell
about things that happen when your mouth doesn’t form
the hole No on the rocks in Marin and then you spill out
so much that you’re wearing Depends for a week
and when you touch, your finger comes up poison plumeria,
wet bright milk from a cup. I want to talk about squamous cells
and their link, they told me, to previous female sexual hyperactivity,
and hey, while I’m at it—

to you, too, over there,

wearing your height-enhancing Texas cowboy boots
and your is-it-big-enough neurosis like a grin—
I most emphatically do not want to say: Auntie Flo,
or paper-covered cervical examinations in sterile rooms,
or monthly visitors or weekly douches or mammary glands,
or smooth-shaven mons venuses on the half-shell, or
feminine protective sanitary napkins, not even if they have wings
built in the sides big enough to fly, not even goddamn then. Yesterday,
one of my baby poets was sick and he asked me to feel his forehead,
and I almost did it, I swear I almost did but I failed. Did I fail you?
Have I mentioned how another kid came to me crying, he left me,
he finally did, and she spent the night on my couch? When I woke,

thinking of nothing but coffee, I saw spots there and marks on the cushions

where, in her night, she was trying to scratch the way through, and standing there

in my flannels, eyes curdled from sleep, I saw that it was wet.

And now you (because what in this good and green earth

have I to protect you from) want to know why I’m made of wet?

I’m made of mother, baby. Come on,

let me show you

my beautiful filth.

600 - LB MARLIN ELUDES

the boy on the boat, his lure and slick line,
and the beast, streaming blue, a wet palette
of blues, dancing the blues, refusing the bind,
centenary migrant, flouting men, bait, intent,
intransitive, needing no one, grows intense, full-blown,
now rises the firmament up through the green lamplit fissure
of home, rides the mezzanine of waves against sun, made stone
for a moment, brighter than forever, arcing teasingly sure
between God and what man is, a one-word sentence, a No
without an object, a

Not yet, I am old, archaic, nomadic

an atheist of God, a warrior, bold, I who have lived below,
a hedonist, a horny fish, having eaten well and known ravishments
and the dailiness of blue, the aching lovely spawn, I will not anchor this
life yet. Boy, this is our curse-gift, a cracked-open door, a fissured palingenesis.

PUB POEM

If I hold my breath for a million ebbing years, little oyster
waiting my tables, fighting the tide, swimming to hope
and still I can’t open you up, love,
I’ll marry the fat red tomato
I got from an infatuated farmer who waits pleasantly
with knife and fork to eat me.
I’ll marry the warm brown York, where naked swimming
is like breathing, a priority, and only as dangerous
as the soft-shell crabs slipping away on the sandy floor of the river.
I’ll marry my worn work shirt, stained with Corona and crab cake
and sweat and a little smear of cocktail sauce like a margin.
I’ll marry each lonely marine I wait on,
he and I will picture a possible me, painting my toenails
bloodred in a trailer, waiting for him,
for the slippery click of the lock;
knowing it now, we look away.
I’ll marry the teasing moon whose bright vowels dance on the water
like the Yorktown Slut, promising everything,
sighing, before she slips away
what if, what if.
I’ll engage my boss on his boat in thoughts of bra straps
and panties and other wistful trappings,
which become, like breathing, a priority.
I’ll marry each barnacle I scrub
bare, barely staying afloat,
while the bass slip away past the rockabye boat and the waves whisper
dive under, dive under, seduction is rare,
seduction is hope.
I’ll marry the Pub, and slop ice-cold mugs of beer
onto men whose eyes seem to say that I, too, am replaceable.
My sneakered feet will slip, I’ll wed the salted floor that way—
slide into the sun and marry the day.
I’ll marry the bent mirror in the back
where I pin up my marmalade hair
and stare at lips as red as cocktail sauce
the round everpresent planet of mouth
and fragile freckled arms who miss the man who slipped away.
I’ll marry my beautiful brown teacher whose letters,
which say angst is my downfall, I read on the sneak

on a Budweiser box amongst the dead clams and unconsummated lemons

in the back of the Pub; I’ll marry my downfall.
And if I fall down a hole as big as the Chesapeake Bay, big as my whole
yummy heart, today’s Special of the Day,
I’ll marry it.

FIRST COMMUNION

Mother when I was so small I was still
you (only with big eyes)
you brought your fragile claws down
over the dinner wine
over the pastel ladies home journal tablecloth
over your husband’s disciplinary roar
onto the sullen crystal dish.

Burgundy ran sideways
down through the curtains down through the floor
and over us the gentle Lenten palm leaves rocked
green above the door. Daddy drove.
The emergency room door looked tiny from the parking lot.
I would never fit into it and I didn’t. I stayed where I was
the way little girls do, behind the crystal windowpane
of the station wagon waiting and tracing my name in the dew.
When you came out, all cotton fragile corners and dark smudges,
you had four wire ribbons
in your wrist, one for each year I was born.
I wanted to climb back into you.

Later you lay in another room
with the door open, flooded, silent
under daddy’s big legs,
and I crawled myself
under the green fronds
into the kitchen’s glassy secret mess
into high sweet sacrament that stank of blood and wine
and I cut myself on a piece of your shining eye.

HOLDING

I have waited so long for you. When I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• I.
• II.
• III.
• Acknowledgments