Lapis

By Kerri Webster

In Lapis, poet Kerri Webster writes into the vast space left by the deaths of three women: her mother, a mentor, and a friend. Using a wide array of lyric forms and meditations, Webster explores matrilineages both familial and poetic, weaving together death, spirituality, women, and a sense of the shifting earth into one "doctrine of Non-linear Revelation."

Elegy

And I was equal to my longing:
the mums blackening;
sorrow a carboned figurine;
the firmament steaming; your ashes
interred in the boulder;
the ugly birds crying dolor dolor dolor;
the sky smoke-choked—what, then,
would you have had be my register?
As the beasts of the field rub their antlers off
with ooh-itch pleasure; as the screen says
You often open around this time; as the grapes
blight: listen: sometimes
we're the pilgrim, sometimes
we're the site.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Release date: Aug 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9780819500212

Kerri Webster

Kerri Webster is a poet and professor raised in Idaho. She is the author of four collections of poetry Lapis, The Trailhead, Grand & Arsenal, and We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone, as well as two chapbooks, Psalm Project and Rowing Through Fog. Grand & Arsenal was selected by Jane Mead for the Iowa Poetry Prize, and We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone was selected by Elizabeth Robinson as the winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series. She is also a recipient of the 2011 Whiting Award and the Alice Fay di Castagnola award from the Poetry Society of America. Her work has appeared in a number of journals including the Boston Review, Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review and American Poet. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Boise State University.

Book preview

oh each poet’s a / beautiful human girl who must die

and then where do her words go? In the mouth mine feel all wrong, like ventifact which means stone planed by aeolian winds into daggered facets but sounds like a furnace part. What’s the monosyllable for griefborn lunacy? I dream a festival at which I’ve forgotten all my verses. I own a dead man’s ventifact brutalized by Arctic winds into an awl. Marni was there, standing against the back wall. Someone said the words are under the smoothest stones. Someone said the dictionary shares our beds. Said words reside inside the star-shaped creature. Said words are righteous and come in tongues. Said the Word is broken. Said Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry. Said the very word is like a bell. Said words alter in our digestive tracts. And someone said the words are numinous, so why can’t I see them? Not the words on our shelves, but the ones they didn’t get to. What must I leave on the altar of grief to hear their untongued words? A ram? A forest? I will burn this life down to riverbed, will drown in the dead’s bitter wine. Silences crush my chest. I don’t recall how The Dead ends, just remember it as flawless text. What else do I forget? When our mother was dying, my sister said Get her voice. Get her grocery lists. I do, I do feel the pull of divesting of the earthly plane. When my mother died, Marni said Throw that morphine away. Yum lavender seeping up the plunger. Kingdom Unsaid.

I

Primrose, Orchid, Datura

To say I lived on honeycomb is not enough. I lived

on milkfat, garnets, whiskey bottles under the bed,

lotion pearlescent on pink skin. I slept half the day,

woke late, ate ridiculous bouquets, milked austerity

for gorgeousness — blossoms collected in jars,

granite thieved from silt. I napped and architected

a decadent inwardness. I did not know that the Christbody

would take up residence in the next room, in a hospice

bed, until the whole house smelled like nightblown

Gethsemane, or that this would go on until the world

ran out of sponges from its acrid seas. Once I was a girl

who wore feathers and ivory, a woman who let

the tap run in the desert past all decency. Forgive me.

Seer Stone

Put the stone in the upturned hat. Lean your face into the darkness. Tell me if the body of Christ can save you, and where the treasure is, and when the locusts. Tell me if my mother can see her children from the ether. Two of us are stoned, one of us is drunk, one yells something across the house to the girlchild who, in being born, saved