Heaven is Us Being a Flower Together by Max Ritvo
Heaven is Us Being a Flower Together
Max Ritvofor V
I think death comes at blindness.
I think pupils are sails,
and death is when the wind goes slack.Winter, by being so white,
it is trying to talk to me—closing communicated to one who sees death
as white worms
riddling the apple of the eye.You think death comes at the cessation of touch.
You are a flower bulb
which can feel even in the winter earth:coldness as its body
of sensation.The cold is a line that will not bend,
drawn through you foot to head.Heat is a planet
fleeing its own cold line,
its primary chill.I have written this poem inside of you.
I am clutched in with your mother blood,
feeling your bends in the dark,
becoming a soft bend in your body.
I feel a circle grow in your stomach.We are becoming a bulb
in the ground of the living,
in the winter of being alive.
MARGINALIA
1.
How do we make sense of dying while still inside the body? How do we speak from within it as if language could reach beyond it?
2.
When I am beside you or when I hear your voice from the other room, I can feel another kind of time pressing against the one we’re
3.
I don’t know what comes after this life, and most days I try not to look too hard in that direction.
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Four Reincarnations: Poems by Max Ritvo, published by Milkweed Editions, 2016. (Available direct from Milkweed Editions • Also on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“When Max Ritvo was diagnosed with cancer at age sixteen, he became the chief war correspondent for his body. The poems of Four Reincarnations are dispatches from chemotherapy beds and hospitals and the loneliest spaces in the home. They are relentlessly embodied, communicating pain, violence, and loss. And yet they are also erotically, electrically attuned to possibility and desire, to “everything living / that won’t come with me / into this sunny afternoon.” Ritvo explores the prospect of death with singular sensitivity, but he is also a poet of life and of love—a cool-eyed assessor of mortality and a fervent champion for his body and its pleasures.
Ritvo writes to his wife, ex-lovers, therapists, fathers, and one mother. He finds something to love and something to lose in everything: Listerine PocketPak breath strips, Indian mythology, wool hats. But in these poems—from the humans that animate him to the inanimate hospital machines that remind him of death—it’s Ritvo’s vulnerable, aching pitch of intimacy that establishes him as one of our finest young poets.” (Source)
ABOUT MAX RITVO
Max Ritvo (1990-2016) wrote Four Reincarnations in New York and Los Angeles over the course of a long battle with cancer. He was also the author of The Final Voicemails, edited and introduced by Louise Glück, and co-authored Letters from Max with Sarah Ruhl; both books were published posthumously. His chapbook Aeons was chosen by Jean Valentine to receive the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship in 2014. Ritvo’s poetry has appeared in the New Yorker and Poetry, among… (more)
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ENDNOTES
- Explore other works in pursuit of: living • winter • body • Or browse the index
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