Deborah DeNicola
First Irony
As a child I had the thought the word necklace meant “without a neck,” and then came the knowledge it’s jewelry around a neck . . . irony—playing havoc with my right brain, rocketing it into what somersaults could come from candid vocabulary, flying me back through that twilit learning that begins in peddling a bicycle on grass, how all is melodic wonder flowering among domestic animals. I remember the baroque cabin, the bric-a-brac over the window through which we saw the barnacled side of a rowboat. Fences. Plastic statues on the lawn. Necromantic Mountains. And a remote shore with two civil war cannons that led my cerebellum through the swollen garden in August to the topiary volcanoes of red carpenter ants, their carnal innocence and sands' erasures beneath the swing set. My white Keds lifting the aqua mantles of clouds, pre-pubescent discovery articulated in the birds' nude notes—my alphabet of irony for the first time palpable among descendant weeds, beneath the necklace of a ficus tree.
Deborah DeNicola is the author of several poetry collections and most recently her memoir, The Future That Brought Her Here from Nicholas Hays/Ibis Press. Another poetry collection, Original Human, is forthcoming in 2010 from Custom Word. Among other awards, she received an NEA Fellowship for her poetry.
