I was involved in the serious business
of ripping apart my own body.
I’ d run my fingers over it,
seeking but never finding
the right point of entry,
so having to tear one myself,
though midway through
I’ d always tire,
and let night enter
like a silver needle,
sewing my eyelids shut.
This was not an original practice,
but thinking, for a time, that it was
felt like being able to choose
when spring would arrive:
engineering an April
Morning’ s mirage, disdainful & calm
as a mirror,
held the shorn bush that yesterday
flourished,
now lopped canes & a scant spitfall
of remnance,
confetti trampled in the clefts
of vanishing deer.
To touch its truth I punched my fist
into the chopped molest,
the boscage — withdrew my red sleeve.
Abstract that.
Had to come in out of the people,
they blew me about so.
Was told of the life taking place
elsewhere. Went to check on that,
flying late and low over the west.
Saw no house, no shade.
Sat down on the damp bank
on the far shore at the left
edge of the world, against which
the sea endlessly lapped.
So now there were two of us,
who beat the world by
day and caressed it by night
and the world didn’ t say
yea and she didn’ t say nay.
Last night in bed
I mouthed a prayer
of my own composition.
It sounded offhand, it was carelessly
addressed, it twisted my meaning
entirely, it left an ache,
I didn’ t know what I was doing.
So I took down my yellowed copy
of French With Pictures
by the late literary critic I. A. Richards
and I put my petition
into soft French words.
I don’ t buy it, says
the scientist.
Replies the frail
and faithful heart,
it’ s not for sale.
Full of strength and laced
with fragility:
the thoroughbred,
the hummingbird,
and all things
cursed
with agility.
A lizard does not make a sound,
it has no song,
it does not share my love affairs
with flannel sheets,
bearded men, interlocking
silver rings, the moon,
the sea, or ink.
But sitting here the afternoon,
I’ ve come to believe
we do share a love affair
and a belief —
in wink, blink, stone,
and heat.
Also, air.
This is not a fable,
nor is it bliss.
Impatience,
remember this.
From the far star points of his pinned extremities,
cold inched in — black ice and squid ink —
till the hung flesh was empty.
Lonely in that void even for pain,
he missed his splintered feet,
the human stare buried in his face.
He ached for two hands made of meat
he could reach to the end of.
In the corpse’ s core, the stone fist
of his heart began to bang
on the stiff chest’ s door, and breath spilled
back into that battered shape. Now
The King saith, and his arm swept the landscape’ s foliage into bloom
where he hath inscribed the secret mysteries of his love
before at last taking himself away. His head away. His
recording hand. So his worshipful subjects must imagine
themselves in his loving fulfillment, who were no more
than instruments of his creation. Pawns.
Apparati. Away, he took himself and left us
studying the smudged sky. Soft pencil lead.
I came awake in kindergarten,
under the letter K chalked neat
on a field-green placard leaned
on the blackboard's top edge. They'd cagedme
in a metal desk — the dull word writ
to show K's sound. But K meant kick and kill
