from Lisa Marie Basile: 2 summer poems

 

Every summer I reread Camus’ The Stranger and think on that bright hot captivating rage induced by the sun—how it destroys empathy, connection, clarity. 

These poems engage the fever dream of late July/early August, when everything melts into itself and feelings become delusional and from the very belly of despair. 

saint of summer nightmares

We are married in a blue room in the belly of the Mediterranean. Bodies stick to white wooden pews as dusk moves in like prayer. I can smell the whole room dying; hands and eyes now interred in majolica, & me in my mantilla with the dew of the dead at my feet.

No one talks about how much they hate me; they just long for the ocean. 

And then the vows— a void of silence—  

fill the room like knives. 

I am given no promise, and I have no promise to make.

The streets, lolling of lemon,

and I cannot keep from falling.

The champagne sours black in the sun. 

Women watch with their linen on the line

from their balconettes of disdain.

I am an American girl of lace and bloat; I am an unbelonging, 

come for love and was given hatred. Everyone on the island knows my surname and exactly how to say it, spat out as serpent. 

My body, putrid come noon. 

My body, a long shadow clobbering 

toward the cool of a village nave. 

What doorway must I walk through to absolve this grotesque heart?   

Am I a girl on an island or am I the island? 

saint of summer sorrow

Marigolds sweat through summer malaise 

I fling myself across linen duvets

a dolorous descent into obsession

I think nonstop of the fissure but nothing 

of what it could contain

of the way my body softens

but never that it is a body at all 

I carry an endlessness

in these summer nights

glitching for white cotton compulsions

made pretty with fever

What if I misspoke? 

What if I’m bad but not sorry?

What happens when I am no longer mobile?

What if I can’t be beautiful?

Who am I when I have no poetry left?

These, the follies of solstice heat

These, the Julys

of loss

when I am at the mercy of night’s
glittering interior Let an angel

cool my forehead with her palm

Let autumn know I’m begging 

At my bedside a water pitcher  

a want to be within a great quiet body of light