April 3rd 2008
Paisley Rekdal
Paisley Rekdal was born in Seattle, Washington, the child of a Chinese American mother and Norwegian American father. She attended school at the University of Washington and Trinity College, Dublin, as an undergraduate, where she studied English. She received her MA in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto and her MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan. After teaching English in Chonju, South Korea for a year, she returned to the States to teach and write. She has taught at the University of Wyoming and, currently, the University of Utah, where she is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing.
Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (Pantheon 2000 and Vintage 2002), and three books of poetry, A Crash of Rhinos (University of Georgia Press 2000), Six Girls Without Pants (Eastern Washington University Press 2002), and The Invention of the Kaleidoscope (University of Pittsburgh Press 2007). Her work has received a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, an NEA Fellowship, the University of Georgia Press’ Contemporary Poetry Series Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, several Pushcart Prize nominations, and the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review. Her poems and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New York Times Magazine, Nerve, Ploughshares, Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, Quarterly West, and on National Public Radio among others.
Strawberry
I am going to fail.
I’m going to fail cartilage and plastic, camera and arrow.
I’m going to fail binoculars and conjugations,
all the accompanying musics: I am failing,
I must fail, I can fail, I have failed
the way some women throw themselves
into lover’s arms or out trains,
fingers crossed and skirts billowing
behind them. I’m going to fail
the way strawberry plants fail,
have dug down hard to fail, shooting
brown runners out into silt, into dry gray beds,
into tissue and rock. I’m going to fail
the way their several hundred hearts below surface
have failed, thick, soft stumps desiccating
to tumors; the way roots wizen in the cold
and cloud black, knotty as spark plugs, cystic
synapses. I’m going to fail light and stars and tears.
I’m going to fail the way cowards only wish they could fail,
the way the brave refuse to fail or the vain fear to,
believing that to stray even once from perfection
is to be permanently cast out, Wandering Jew
of failure, Adam of failure, Sita of failure; that’s the way
I’m going to fail, bud and creosote and cloud.
I’m failing pet and parent. I’m failing the food
in strangers’ stomachs, the slender inchoate rings
of distant planets. I’m going to fail these words
and the next and the next. I’m going to fail them,
I’m going to fail her—trust me, I’ve already failed him—
and the possibility of a we is going to sink me
like a bad boat. I’m going to fail the way
this strawberry plant has failed, alive without bud,
without fruit, without tenderness, hugging itself
to privation and ridiculous want.
I’m going to fail simply by standing in front of you,
waving my arms in your face as if hailing a taxi:
I’m here, I’m here, please don’t forget me,
though you already have, I smell it, even cloaked
with soil, sending out my slender fingers for you,
sending out all my hair and tongue and brain.
I’m going to fail you
just as you’re going to fail me,
urging yourself further down to sediment
and the tiny, trickling filaments of damp;
thirsty, thirsty, desperate to drown
if even for a little while, if even for once:
to succumb, to be destroyed,
to die completely, to fail the way I’ve failed
in every particular sense of myself,
in every new and beautiful light.
