January 2018
Christine Gelineau
gelineau@binghamton.edu
gelineau@binghamton.edu
My husband and I raise Morgan horses on a farm in the Susquehanna River valley of upstate New York, where I also tend a large garden of vegetables and perennials. I teach at Binghamton University and in the low-residency MFA at Wilkes University. My poetry and essays have appeared widely and I am the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently CRAVE from NYQ Press in 2016. For more information please visit my website: http://christinegelineau.com/.
Nothing to It
There’s nothing to destruction:
the brutal do it easily
dismantling in an instant
what took months, decades
even centuries to build.
The first door to close
is the heart, muscle contracted
down to a fist: once you’ve closed
yourself inside that darkness all
the other barricades, all
the other strikes feel justified.
Must there always be someone
to kick the blocks in?
To firebomb the churches and tuck
explosives into the crevices of ancient
treasures, mushrooming a civilization’s
legacy into red dust?
Must there always be a hand
to sweep away the fruits of decades
of bloody protest and slow compromise
with the flourish of a pen? To tear
through the safety nets and bulldoze
the protective gates, choking
the streams with slag,
the air with haze?
Demolition is the instant payoff
—volatile, thrilling, an aphrodisiac
of power.
Creation drags along
in slo-mo, a chick flick
of unfolding and relationships:
how we’re drawn to the swing, the bang,
the rubble, rubbernecking by the wreck
as if we thought
obliteration was some kind
of an accomplishment.
Nothing to It
There’s nothing to destruction:
the brutal do it easily
dismantling in an instant
what took months, decades
even centuries to build.
The first door to close
is the heart, muscle contracted
down to a fist: once you’ve closed
yourself inside that darkness all
the other barricades, all
the other strikes feel justified.
Must there always be someone
to kick the blocks in?
To firebomb the churches and tuck
explosives into the crevices of ancient
treasures, mushrooming a civilization’s
legacy into red dust?
Must there always be a hand
to sweep away the fruits of decades
of bloody protest and slow compromise
with the flourish of a pen? To tear
through the safety nets and bulldoze
the protective gates, choking
the streams with slag,
the air with haze?
Demolition is the instant payoff
—volatile, thrilling, an aphrodisiac
of power.
Creation drags along
in slo-mo, a chick flick
of unfolding and relationships:
how we’re drawn to the swing, the bang,
the rubble, rubbernecking by the wreck
as if we thought
obliteration was some kind
of an accomplishment.
"Nothing to It" appears in the anthology Like Light (Bright Hill Press, Dec. 2017)
©2018 Christine Gelineau
©2018 Christine Gelineau
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