Cry Back My Sea

Stunning poems of obsession, loss, and the desire for a renewed self, from the award-winning poet

“I thought I had left behind the darkness / of the heart,” Arvio confesses in the poem “Small War.” The love Arvio traces in these pages is indeed a battle, one in which the best-laid plans are shattered. Rarely has a poet tackled intimate love with so much invention and bravery.
 
In poem after poem, we meet the troubling lover whose nearness and force undoes her. There are moments of reprieve: “my naked body and budding pleasure / in the weather of your presence. / Not whether your presence but how.” The voice is vulnerable, self-knowing, often funny; the poet seems to be writing these poems to save herself from a devastating passion. Her weapons are a cascade of brash, freely spoken lines and a powerful command of metaphor, wielded in a search for meaning and understanding.
 
These breathtaking love poems make the collection Arvio’s most universal to date."Sarah Arvio's Cry Back My Sea is a performance in the language of heartbreak and longing. . . Using nothing but words, Arvio sends out ripples of sounds and connotations that build up and pare down meaning into waves of sense and sensation. . . The swelling of words crests, and the foam left on the surface sounds like a foreign language that, as it turns out, you understand fluently. . . These poems are a tour through the semantics of someone else's mind, masterfully crafted by the poet to require just enough translation to conjure not just the satisfaction of surprise, but the intimacy of discovery that goes along with love and heartbreak." —Vanessa Loh, Shining Rock Poetry


“These poems are an ode to the heart . . . The intimate love described is at times all desire and physical affection, until it becomes disconnection or violence, with an underlying theme of control over a woman . . . Arvio’s voice is witty and wise, candid and calculated. Although the poems can read like streams of consciousness, each is distinct, worthy, and shaped with skill and inventiveness.” —Janet St. John, Booklist

“[A] truly original work of art . . . In her use of language, Arvio is among the most luminous and engaging poets of her generation. Even when dealing with a question as terrible as abandonment—the most terrible of all—the light never abandons the song, with its counterpoints and variations.” —Alejandro Oliveros, Prodavinci
SARAH ARVIO, the author of night thoughts: 70 dream poems & notes from an analysis, Sono: cantos, and Visits from the Seventh, and the translator of Federico García Lorca (Poet in Spain), is a recipient of the Rome Prize and the Bogliasco and Guggenheim Fellowships, among other honors. For many years a translator for the United Nations in New York and Switzerland, she has taught poetry at Princeton and Columbia. She lives in New York City.Nest

And then there came a day that was a day
a world of my wanting with you in it
 
and all the small creatures came to our side
mewing and cheeping as small creatures do
 
a day I had wanted for a long time
a small-creature hour in the life of our day
 
where there were many places to lie down
and sigh and sleep and cogitate and hug
 
a huge happening among the small lives
a little cuddle with a dream in it

a coddled egg an apron with a bib
a nest for nourishing the ragged nerves
 
O robin O rabbit O bat O tiny vole
all flyers and burrowers come to us now
 
through our heat ducts and tear ducts and chimneys
come to us with your small-world intentions
 
that place where only we know how to live
where no one else knows what we say and do
 
no one knows the crumbs or the flies we eat
or the silly songs we hum as we sleep



Sinbad (or Symbiotic)

I’m agog in the synagogue of love
and the sin is I don’t know my Sinbad
 
Is he Gog or Bes or the seven dwarves
He has been an assault on my senses
 
a leap and a slam and a somersault
It was in summer that we fell in love
 
Love and hate he can’t get them straight
we should be sailing home in a schooner
 
He needs some synergy between his selves
instead there’s ergonomic confusion

He was erotic and he was erratic
he was scintillating and then savage
 
It’s a symbiotic thing my bio and his
I’ll need an antibiotic to fight him
 
That’s a symbol for a powerful drug
No I think I’ll need a synecdoche
 
I’ll need a singer in my synagogue
The sin is I’ve already left the dock
 
and I think I’ll need the seven voyages
Szymborska could write this better than me
 
I’m banging on my cymbals and crying out
Saudade saudade is what’s coming for me
 
I have to go now—though how I don’t know
 


Shoe

I was going to meet my own death
and it stood me up
 
Or that is I stood up and said not now
Some days I know I won’t stand for it
 
Can you stand the thought of being dead
some days I think I’ll take it lying down
 
Sometimes it’s good to take a stand
though I think I want a standard-issue death
 
Shoe in shoe out without a horn
or play me a horn as I go and come

Or maybe not you but someone else
whose job it is to usher me forth
 
Stand down I don’t know what this means
Stand up and soft-shoe across the room
 
The issue is well do you like your life
Oh hand me a tissue I do want to cry
 
There’s no such thing as a stand-alone shoe
There are always two to cover feet
 
Think of not knowing how to feel
think of that while dancing on your heel

Death might not be up or even down
it could slip in sideways it could shuffle
 
It could stand very still
like a life on the stand of the world
 
Do hand me a tissue or a handkerchief
I don’t know whether to wave or cry
 
I don’t know whether to live or die
it could slide sideways after all
 
Like two shoes dancing in the living room
or two heels hopping in the dying room


Red Dress

It’s wrong to live wrong I was thinking this
and wringing my hands I wrung my hands
 
Wasn’t it right to live right and to write
about the right life rather than living wrong
 
and writing about the wrong life Which is righter
which is wronger The thing is
 
if you have the wrong life you don’t
want to tell  thinking always that somehow you
 
will right it Righting and writing it’s a kind
of redress a new dress I’ll put on when I

rewrite my life I’ll run out and get it now
while there’s still time  a red dress for joy
 
a red dress for redress and I’ll dress you
down as I walk out the door You’ll ring
 
and ring but I won’t rush back I won’t
write back You’ll be right and I’ll be
 
wronged  and that’s what I’ll tell if I get
the time but not to you you won’t be told
 
You can read my redress in the papers
I’ll be out on the town in my red dress