after each failure, let me lay the bone of my nose
on the peach flesh and lift up my mouth to the pit

want to be there? I whimper as though … silly …
then get mad. I could smash your valiant head.

 

Completely naked. mons completely gray.
my mother tells me how to masturbate

“What are you looking for?” and feel it will
be hid from me, whatever it is still,
or rapidly moving beyond my frequency.

I’d get my own portrait. I’d show it to the next boy
before I got undressed, “Here’s what you’re getting.”

I try to keep the promises I make
—for each one broken breaks the world—and seem
inhuman: no crack, no fissure, no mistake.

I love desire, the state of want and thought
of how to get; building a kingdom in a soul
requires desire. I love the things I’ve sought—

Couldn’t look at myself. I trust you saw my taupe
skin on the clammy bedsheets clearer than I did.

Why would an orgasm make someone weep?
Why, for being loved now when one had not been.

 

How daring to become my clever, lying
grandmother and before that my sister whose loved,

Temples look like discarded alphabets.
We loved lying in their shadows lazily
deciphering and resting and laying bets

It doesn’t speak and it isn’t schooled,
like a small foetal animal with wettened fur.
It is the blind instinct for life unruled,

Broken lines continue, you know, way past
their breaks, as medians in roads do, or
the dot tracings in kid’s books, where the last

Never so deeply in love as I am
have I been,
never so nourished by touch as I am

Putting a burden down feels so empty
you almost want to hoist it up again,
for to carry nothing means there is no “me,”

All my life I’ve had goals to go after, goals
in a molten distance.

Now that my desires suit my powers
I find a splendid past in this present

Molly Peacock’s poem “The Distance Up Close” appeared in our Summer 1983 issue. Her most recent book is The Paper Garden. The Distance Up CloseAll my life I’ve had goals to go after, goals
in a molten distance. And just the way snows
in the distance, d…