B O O K S

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03/2002. xvii, 75 pages.
0896724840
978-0-89672-484-6

Skin

By April Lindner
Foreword by Robert A. Fink

Haven’t we all been told how beauty is thin as truth? And don’t we believe and disbelieve this “lie we’d carve and starve for. / We’d suck it till the juice ran down our arms”? Skin compels us, repels us. Beauty may be only skin deep, a fine covering—sensuous, at times translucent, almost transparent, and yet so obdurate. Skin insulates, guarding its vital organs just beneath this surface that teases us to peek, to try to penetrate. We call this desire by many names, the best of which is love. April Lindner’s sensuously orchestrated collection of poems conveys the beauty and truth of love, how we know it to be paradoxical, obsessive, fearful, rapacious, holy.—Robert Fink

Fontanel

Here’s the ravine, a stretch of skin
spanning the breach like a footbridge.
Canvas-thin, it trembles with the blood
that runs beneath. Something less tangible
courses there too, a whitewater flume
of images: the stretching housecat;
car keys that sing and catch light;
floorboards knotted with dark, animal eyes;
the window with its shifting square of sky.
All things equal, each thing startling,
and everything unmediated by the mind’s
habitual grapple with why
and so what. You frown at a faded
wallpaper pineapple, and the membrane
flutters harder. I’m careful
when I comb your sparse brown hair.
When I sing your name I borrow a lilt
I’d never use in speech. The words
don’t matter; I’m saying drink me while you can,
like milk. Let me be flesh and flannel,
hands that loosen your tangled blanket.
Know me by scent before you learn my name,
before doorknobs turn into doorknobs,
before the gates knit shut.