Michael Tyrell
To Have Them
Even my beloved bees set upon me today when I numbly knocked aside their sugar feeder, and I am all over stings….
—Sylvia Plath, in a letter to her mother, October 1962
One week into lockdown
the dogwoods flowering
look more foam than flower.
Flowers at the ground and in branches
a white at the lips like a first symptom.
A stillness, as in post-seizure.
Maybe a first symptom, noticing.
Like losing smell, shedding the taste buds, the tongue’s
scant flowers. How many of us
flowering now insignificantly, not noticeably?
Faces in boxes on the phone
and faces beaming through screens in Lombardy.
And still it’s spring like the sum of many previous
springs. The outside what you remember,
not the hours at home.
The beloved bees you can’t see in the rain.
All along building and dismantling the flowers.
The sirens and the mourning doves
like the mask and the rubber gloves.
Like the sum of springs, like noticing.
Like, I am all over stings.
I go outside.
I put each of them on.
Against all sense
wanting skin against skin again.
More than the words and the masks
and the gloves.
For someone in the world,
to topple me, take them off me—
to have to touch me, talk to me
to have them.
—Submitted on
Michael Tyrell is the author of Phantom Laundry (Backlash Press, 2017) and The Wanted (National Poetry Review Press, 2012). With Julia Spicher Kasdorf, he edited the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (NYU Press, 2007). His poems have appeared in Agni, Iowa Review, New England Review, The New Republic, The New York Times, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other journals, as well as in The Best American Poetry 2015 (Simon and Schuster, 2015; series editor David Lehman, guest editor Sherman Alexie). Born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, Tyrell holds a BA from New York University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
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