Solve for Desire - Caitlin Bailey

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Given the Depth

      15  Somewhere a Key

       III.

      1  Spin

      2  Grete Asks the Hard Question

      3  Animus

      4  Keening

      5  Poppies

      6  Men I Could Have Loved

      7  Litany for G

      8  Umwelt

      9  Wild Boat

       IV.

      1  Love Lustrum

      2  On the One-Year Anniversary of Your Death

      3  To Coax a Wound

      4  Poem about Desire

      5  Sanatorium

      6  Burden and Roar

      7  Tethered

      8  Paradise

      9  Riot

      10  Unfetter

      11  What Comes After

      12  The Poem about Birds I Can’t Write

      13  To G, after the Party

      14  Living Without

        Notes

        Works Consulted

        Acknowledgments

        About the Author

      Finding you everywhere nowhere I travel

      in this spaciousness are you absent.

      DEBORAH KEENAN

      Georg Trakl was an Austrian poet born in 1887. He was addicted to drugs for much of his life and had an extremely close relationship with his younger sister, Grete, the extent of which nobody knows. Grete was a gifted pianist and also addicted to drugs. Georg trained as a pharmacist in Vienna and began to publish his poetry. Grete, meanwhile, lived in Vienna and Berlin, studying piano. Georg eventually enlisted in the army and completed several tours before serving as a pharmacist and medic during World War I. After a horrific incident in Gródek (in modern-day Ukraine) in 1914, wherein he attempted suicide, Georg was hospitalized in Poland and ultimately died following what might have been a purposeful cocaine overdose— perhaps because of the atrocities of war he witnessed. He left all of his money and belongings to Grete. Grete committed suicide at a party less than three years later.

      I.

      WHOEVER DRINKS FROM ME

       Come, let us go away together into the wide world.

      —THE BROTHERS GRIMM

      Be not tiger nor wolf to rend me,

      but brother as deer.

      Brother as thirst.

      Quarrel of forest, windfall of firs.

      Water meant to wound

      we repurpose.

      Too dangerous to keep you

      in the world.

      Take to the woods, deer brother.

      Dear brother.

      Here I adorn you.

      Adore you.

      Here is our sorrow tree.

      Here is our hollow.

      Here only the sweetest grass.

      O, your crown of rushes.

      Finally our good hour.

      Our gold all-encompassing.

      I will never, never leave you.

      Deer brother. Dear brother.

      LOST LETTER

      This is the first time I’ve written to you,

      and I know now why they called me little witch.

      My hands have done terrible things.

      I remember the first time, your hand cupped

      over the glass and over mine, O charging desire—

      the welcome rush of the wild heart, poppies

      blooming under my skin, a perfect red burst.

      And now he’s in the other room, and I can’t

      be long remembering you. You wore your anger

      like a bare coat until I plucked myself from your

      pocket. I knew nothing of loss.

      PIGEONS

      Once we walked into a field and watched pigeons

      black out the sky, thousands of wings whirring,

      and it was a wonder they stayed aloft.

      The most brilliant part of you exists to haunt me:

      a bomb in the womb or men in the rafters.

      Sometimes

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