'All the beds of the past cannot dress the ghosts / at my table'

Prayers or Oubliettes by Natalie Diaz

1
Despair has a loose daughter.
I lay with her and read the body's bones
like stories. I can tell you the year-long myth
of her hips, how I numbered stars,
the abacus of her mouth.

2
The sheets are berserks with wind's riddling.
All the beds of the past cannot dress the ghosts
at my table. Their breasts rest on plates
like broken goblets whose rims I once thirsted at.
Instead of grace, we rattle forks
in our empty bowls.

3
We are the muezzins of the desert
crying out like mockers from memory's
violet towers. We scour the earth
as Isis did. Fall is forever here -
women's dresses wrinkle
on the ground, men fall to their knees
in heaps, genitals rotting like spent fruit -
even our roots fall from the soil.

4
The world has tired of tears.
We weep owls now. They live longer.
They know their way in the dark.

5
Unfasten your cage of teeth and tongue.
The taste of a thousand moths is chalk.
The mottled wings are the words to pain.

6
We have no mazel tov.
We call out for our mothers
with empty wine jugs at our heels.

____________

Iterations // All the beds of the past cannot dress the ghosts / at my table

All the beds of the past cannot dress the ghosts / at my table: to overcome her ghosts, she attempts to parody them, by making them into cartoonish figures made out of bedsheets - it doesn't work

All the beds of the past: Not just evoking the image of white sheets, but of a bed, emphasizing the place of rest as what can be made a ghost - what we take comfort 'dresses' ghosts, covers them

at my table: she dines and communes with her ghosts

All: not just invoking the speaker's history, but everyone's

cannot dress: It doesn't work, and can only do so much

dress: something done every day

dress: treat, as in dress a wound; tender

____________

This line fascinates me because it is elliptical in its imagery: one thing leads to another, but then leads back to something else. Diaz evokes an image of beds stretching into the past, which transitions into the image of sheets being thrown over ghosts, which then leads back to the beds of the past also being ghosts, and all of these exist together at her table. It is image in which time stretches backwards and forwards, and stands still, as they all sit together at her table. This is an example of the confusion between prayers and oubliettes in the title, the mixture of pleasure and pain ('The year-long myth / of her hips' (lines 3-4), 'Their breasts rest on plates / like broken goblets whose rims I once thirsted at' (lines 8-9), 'Unfasten your cage of teeth and tongue' (line 23). 

____________

I wanted to try a more impressionistic approach to talking about poems. I find it hard to write mini-essays about poems (as I usually do with the various novels I've written about here), because poetry makes the most impact on me in images, in the lines that leave behind the most dynamic, distinct images, and I wanted to try and capture those images as I see them in my mind, in order to interrogate some of what is going in any given poem. With Iterations, I am hoping to merely present the possibilities and dynamism in any given line of a poem. 

Please let me know your thoughts, and impressions from this poem! It is from Natalie Diaz's collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, published by the always amazing Copper Canyon Press.