Catherine Theis

New Year’s Day

Good morning, gold watch

I don’t have to go anywhere –

Two figures

Playing in the sunshine / /

A tableaux in reverse

It’s on the way outside

A radical reaction

Two loaves and fishes

Keeping forever time

Leonardo da Vinci kept all his sketches

Someone talks and doesn’t listen

Someone listens and doesn’t talk

Who is the “you” in this equation?

And why is she mad?

If you don’t know the answer

To that question –

I can’t help you here

I wonder if everyone knew

Their late 40s would be like this –

So much laughing and

Not enough resistance

Who paints and who doesn’t listen?

The older forms of loss are comforting

2

I dreamt myself into the apex

Of a shell

Of a honeycomb

I saw worlds in miniature

(totally) transformed

The ways of paradise are endless

And when the structure opens

I will be there

Rotting into a severed tooth

Pulled like a radish from the grove

A beautiful onion –  or a lotus

Imagine!

Washed in dirt

3

O says she wishes for no dreams

Because her dreams forsake her

Bad dreams or nightmares

She stands against her own

Knowledge of the world

4

The whir of the hummingbirds

The barking of the dogs

The strawberry tree grows its own fruit of pain

Just like we all do

Within the absent whole

5

I oil the desk

(that infinite tree)

With black sap molasses

Darker than any oil

I’ve ever used or seen

Rotted out blood gasoline stored

In basement barrels obscene

Every once in a while

My hands and arms line up

At the right coordinates

And the air doesn’t weigh a stitch

That’s when I know

The capture

The instant trampoline

6

Obsessed with work

I quit writing poems

I quit counting –

Strumming, drumming

Singing –

I threw away all

The seashells I found

In my room and swept

Up the bone fragments

The tresses of infertile trees

I banished magical thinking

Pumping concrete junk

Into my veins

I swore a cap of crown

Of downtown ground

Gold in my mouth –

And closed the bridge

Of language in

/ / language out

I threw out the sower

The wheatfields and the sketches

Of the cypresses

And tied off the red cord

Not an inch left to stitch

I came clean to the oiled table

A new threshold

[the beginning uncut       The pages a thick

Block of tree reminiscent green

Catherine Theis is the translator of Slashing Sounds (University of Chicago, Press, 2024), the first collection of the Italian poet Jolanda Insana to be published in English. New poems forthcoming in Alta Journal and in Zócalo Public Square. Her latest collection of poems, By a Roman, will be published by Antiphony Press in August 2025.