Poetry by Tucker Lieberman

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Obviously I Want Fire


I go on a long dark walk to forgive myself.
Obviously I want fire, but I have to forgive.
This is the hour. I must recite everything
from memory, but can’t. I can’t remember. The dawn
breaks. Now, here, pea soup fog. There it is,
the frog, haunched:
the crunch of insect,
little plate glass shattering,
lattice wing falling,
my breath just now becoming
a structured activity: hold, count.
This is the forgiving. Now a spot
to catch on glass, a thing to clasp, 
a photograph to hold a candle to,
a century stored in photographs.
Now I remember. Recite.

If this is the end of the world,
obviously I want to be talking to you.
If this is our world,
this is the only one in which I can talk to you.
Can I talk to the part
of your brain that is listening and isn’t mad?
Or, can I talk to the part that is mad,
if that is the only part with which you are listening?

Enough with guilt. Let feelings
be “about,” not “for” or “against.” Let emotion 
not be leashed to pull the sled of judgment.
Judgment pulls itself. Emotion will come
if it likes the sound of its own name.
“On by,” I tell the dogs, go on by
that thing at the side of the road.
We are not chasing it nor being chased by it.

I tend a flame, carry a torch 
until I realize I’m feeding 
whatever it was, and that this is about me
because it burned up the cardboard box in which I held it,
and that I was the box, and that now I am the sky.

What was it. Was it in the photograph.
Here, this is a new seed. Let me water it. Let me think.
Let me someday stop. Let it outlive me.
I wanted fire, obviously. Now I want life
or what comes at the edge of life after the long dark walk, 
beyond forgiving myself.
Let me welcome my Virgil who leads me into the fog.
I am not embarrassed.
Neither must you, Virgil, ever be embarrassed;
there is always a reason you were brought back.
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Tucker Lieberman is the author of Ten Past Noon (2020), a biography of an early 20th-century New York writer. His bilingual poetry book inspired by the Epic of Gilgamesh was a finalist in the Grayson Books 2020 contest. His poems have appeared in many journals including Animal Heart, Dream Noir, Esthetic Apostle, Gingerbread House, Prometheus Dreaming, Raven Review, Sisyphus, and Snakeskin. www.tuckerlieberman.com

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