Current Issue: Spring/Summer 2011

"Music my rampart"  
Dorianne Laux

I can point to the exact place in my chest
where James Taylor’s voice reverberates.
I have no defense against that tenor, those
minor keys. It rushes through the aisles of my body
like a priest on dope, trailing smoke, his crucifix
caught in the folds of his robe. I can know
anything I want to know, but my body reveals me.
I sink down beneath the notes, each light-cracked step.
There are nights I jerk awake as if the phone
had rung. But there’s no sound except
the refrigerator humming, joists
creaking in the cold. I watch moonlight
move across the wall, and it’s as if I could touch
my own sadness, the room flung with filaments
that loom in the pockets of my closed eyes.
There’s no accounting for it. I open my mouth
and sing Sweet Baby James. I cross my hands
over my breasts like a woman who is happy to die.

 

Dorianne Laux's most recent collections are The Book of Men and Facts about the Moon. Laux is also author of Awake, What We Carry, and Smoke from BOA Editions, as well as a fine press edition, Dark Charms, from Red Dragonfly Press. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University and is founding faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program.