The thoughtof all the grassblown over to one sidehurts me. That windcan do that. I must havegotten to him firstthough he pushed out againstthe pouch in meI now call soulless.Of everyone I’ve meton earth I always findthey got here firstand will they teachme their goodreason for staying?I would disciplinea comet againstmy way of leaving,push it out of sky aftersky and afterevery loss on earththe baby I waswould come back. That’swhat it means to be lovable,to give oneself wholeagain whole birthwhole fist whole flowerbut only what fitsharmlessly wholein the mouth.The baby comes and goes,comes back to weed meof my body, feeds mybald birdieswhat’s not for me to know.I had hoped allmy animosity toward menwould lead towardsafety in one whowould wake me beforeI hit the wooden worldand rock me thereto say what violencehad not yet come.
First Wound Kept Open
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- April 12, 2023
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“First Wound Kept Open” from LYING IN: by Elizabeth Metzger.
Published by Milkweed Editions on April 11, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Elizabeth Metzger.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of Lying In, as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook Bed. Her poems have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and Poem-a-Day. Her essays have been published in Boston Review, Guernica, Conjunctions, PN Review, and Literary Hub, among others. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and she lives in California.
“This book is profound in the way it portrays love, loss, numbness and longing. … the overall arc of this amazing collection, ranging from poignance to the introspective, this body of work is a thoughtful offering that stays with the reader. I celebrate its unique relationship with language, its fine approach to storytelling, its ageless themes, cohesiveness, and how insightfully it delved into complex emotions and ideas, with sensitivity and depth. Lying In is one book to return to as often as one permits the longing for words that are devastatingly beautiful in their communication of experiences that leaves behind it, pools of light we never know how thirsty we are for.”
—Chris Margolin, The Poetry Question
“Elizabeth Metzger’s Lying In is a book orbiting sacrifice, orbiting the way(s) one generation gives life then gives way to the next. She writes, ‘In wildfire ash / I teach our son the alphabet.’ A finger writes letters in the dust of dead trees—what is missing, what is gone, becomes language, literally becomes the shapes from which language is formed. Later, Metzger writes, ‘I brought a weather with me // but it was not expectable / that he would stay this long,’ and I tremble. Really, there is something of Dickinson’s elemental shudder in Metzger’s lyric; I feel it in that deep molten core of me only real art can touch. ‘What vision can be given? / What visible is true?’ Lying In is brilliant, no bullshit. Elizabeth Metzger has become one of my favorite living poets.”
—Kaveh Akbar
“Elizabeth Metzger’s Lying In is a brave book about what enormous things you will do for those you love. Told from the perspective of bedrest, the book uncovers and examines the pain and possibility we all hold within us while lying still. Within this book, poetry lies itself on its own spacious bed, telling us all about the very strangeness of being and what great energy it takes to bother to exist at all. Metzger writes, ‘Child I bend around you / like a boat. / If you live / do not blame the wave.’ Within these lines, we are all the children of poetry, left there wondering if someone will save us. This book will save us.”
—Dorothea Lasky
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