Two Poems by Phoebe Reeves

There are fourteen species of silent star,

and the species vary according to generative power.

A woman cannot perform divination, knowing

that blood and the dead answer. But think—

the soul appeared through a woman who was

a witch, just as the images of things

are called by the names they represent.

Witches bring the soul into the future.

When nights are silent, when we study the dawn,

awake or asleep, the body dreams of fires,

of flying, of water, of desire—some secret,

some animal, some polished stone—

the cries of birds, the words of men, the lines

of the hand. Wishes find such things when they are not.

God, groping blindly, does not always give

the world life. God is subject to a woman.

He can destroy the whole world. God is a false

world, and God does not prevent argument.

The first question, God permits even though He

does not wish it. God would otherwise remain hidden.

God, our first parent, permitted the last question.

God did not influence the stars. He cannot go

beyond those limits. God is most offended by

the fruits of the earth. God, the great uneasiness,

is nothing. God should be stronger than God;

He can do nothing without shame. The serpent

was the first answer. Reason gives way to faith,

the shield of faith more bitter than reason. God

does not see plainly, for God is God Himself.

God wishes this to be. God’s earth is in heaven:

that is to say, earth does not proceed from His will.

God cannot pleasure but He can permit, and His

disease does not result from any witchcraft.

His wife wished to escape, but she ran

before His senses, saying it is not right to do

evil that good may come.

*

Phoebe Reeves’s poems have recently appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Best New Poets 2018, Phoebe, and Forklift, Ohio.

**These poems are part of a book-length project which erases the Malleus Maleficarum, or the “Hammer of the Witches,” a text that was used during the Inquisition to hunt and convict witches, written by Heinrich Kramer and James Springer. A bit on Reeves’s approach to this project:

“The rules of my erasures were that I could delete, but not rearrange or add, except for punctuation. Although at first, I began by deleting at the word-level, as the project progressed, I became much more aggressive about my deletion, and also found myself focusing on certain repetitions. For example, almost every time the word ‘heresy’ appeared, it became ‘her,’ in the poem. It was in this way that I began to uncover the woman these poems speak about. Titles are anagrams of the original section titles.”