each
day is a gorgeous wet machine - - - the
rain-slicked bridge under the night bridge - - - let us walk together along its swaying
twisted cables and let the rivets fall from our necks as we shed sky and pelt
and heat and sleep
I’ve
written your undertow into my will - - -
I have signed it with a fistful of bloody salt - - - this wound my last resort - - - all the music in the dark brine of my heart -
- - its secret pangs like a muffled
church bell - - - my eyes these hard gates
and every kind of armor
you
knew we were warmongers and cannibals - - -
you made me into a wolf whereas before I ate everything bleating and
shivering - - - whereas before I lay
myself down in a lonely grave with my outcast fellows - - - only now to confiscate the law of lucid
dreaming upon this small invisible fire
///
you
signed this contract of wheat paste and unconditional city rain - - - you summoned the wailing wall - - - you made a socket out of our last night - - - into the diurnal wilderness we turned into
swallows and sewed yesterday into our open mouths - - - open to eat wind - - - open to make dark rooms for ghosts - - - for the pack of wolves inside the teeth
rough
blood - - - lurid orbit inside the
subtle body - - - the vindication of God
- - - the deposition of Lucifer - -
- all the rivers of mercy flooding the
rings of Saturn inside your morning - - -
tint of gloat - - - the void my
guide - - - the son of the god his heart
on a stake - - - a jar of water drained
like this eulogy - - - some indelible
outline branded on the skin of the earth - - -
the earth in flight - - - the
earth in pursuit of this heavy light
in
this wolveish congress with the letters of the dead - - - my appetite for graffiti - - - genuflection to the twenty-six occult symbols
made of leopards and glass and fury and orphic keening and wax-wing flight - -
- each day is a prince on his lesser
throne with his lesser hate - - - his
strange brother left in the forest - - -
left to make a machine out of the indifference of owls - - - what to spell with their pellets of the
delicate broken bones of mouse and vole - - -
every night is a widow
///
what
the outside woman craves is strange testimony of the despot - - - the law and the police report in illegible
half-tongues - - - if you could swallow
scissors and thread and birth something durable - - - your own face and body but burning on the
outside instead of the inside - - - the
despot is the gloat of caw and mercury and an army of centaurs en route to the
farthest necropolis - - - their bloody
hooves the calligraphy of man - - -
uncanny man in medias res - -
- dragging the penal colony behind them
as if shadows were machines and crimes
the
pack of wolves inside me spent a year in silence studying the corpses of flight
of the architecture of wind - - - the
ships breech birthed on surprised shores - - -
coasts with chronic insomnia - - -
facing always the wet suffocation of the great black fish with no face -
- - the great creature a mass grave - -
- the shapeless tunnel to swallow light
and gravity - - - the pack of wolves
gnawing on a manuscript of organs - - -
each with a hood - - - each
harboring its own verses on the body
summon
the heart’s four-chambered congregation - - -
we will chase our wolves through the starving blue to the piquant red -
- - what kind of recovery does the
tongue make in its dark narrow room in the back of the throat - - - all the strange velvet inside me - - - rooms and rooms of it - - - a suite of crimes and siblings - - - sharing duration - - - sharing a soldier’s reprieve - - - my body a kind of necropolitan cradle - - - a museum blazing on the inside like the
world’s last night circus
///
if
I vanish after a certain conjuring - - -
follow the spelling - - - follow
the leopards with human hearts in their mouths - - - follow the scent of singed fur as walking
through flames is often required to renew the hollows of the world
lucid
dreaming a kind of air balloon travel - - -
oneironauts floating through ships built hastily in the space between
wake and sleep - - - assembled and
disassembled by morning - - - the wood
shavings and surplus boards and uncanny convex portholes left hastily under
your narrow bed - - - they keep falling
through the floor
the
perimeter of the bed guarded by my soldiers - - - the black laces of their black boots caught
in my hair - - - binding my hands
///
when
I gave the wolves my opera glasses - - -
binoculars - - - magnifying glass
- - - telescope - - - pinhole camera - - - and a set of sharpened knives they set fires
all along the tree line - - - they set
to polishing the world’s remaining lonely library carrels - - - eating the empty space along the way
the
poetics of wolveish space and the displacement of air with the hot breath of
the future - - - I fell asleep in their
den which filled with night-serum and the medicine became my lungs as I
wandered through the rough carbon sleep of abandoned coal mines and saw my
spirit panning for gold in the streams and creeks of the dead
I
saw us there - - - lingering over the
remains of a spectacular - - -
glittering feast
///
perhaps
born in a crime scene - - - perhaps
drawn from my mother as though an exorcism of pins and needles - - - perhaps a child is a prosthesis and a
pantomime - - - perhaps a child is a
cauterization of an oblivion
no
matter because I am a maker of tourniquets and a hawker of all the holy orders
of the world
God
has chosen me - - - lowering all things
to me on a rope - - - busy reading the
syllabus of the body I leave the knitting of my white cloths and send the
wolves inside me to the grotto with that vintage water from snow melt - -
- that water that tastes of the birth of
planets - - - of the iron moon and its
magnetic dreams writing roses all over the night-skin we wear like a priest
disgraced in his winter hunger
perhaps
my private hospital business will expand into purgatorial burial ritual and the
eros of prayer - - - they will come from
far and wide not to be stitched back together like dolls but to pay homage to
me as to a fine landlord - - - a man who
hoards the calamitous light under his robes - - - a scholar of usury - - - perhaps I was born to be a minister of
handbills and rainwater
///
a
human-headed bird made its arrival night after night - - - in my dreams I fell down upon things which
are hidden during the day - - - which
advance upon me at night which draw my lightless body downward toward their
receding forms - - - which remind me
that I have submerged the boat of my enemies and brought myself to silence
I
surrendered my mask and maps and deck of cards to god who made me his property
without quarantine or inventory - - - a
plate of ozone slipped under the cell door - - - the key made of mushrooms and eaten every
morning - - - a shadow made of soot - -
- he brings me a kind of a spike to
bleed the humors that turn to dust when they meet the air - - - he promises new veins - - - he promises gifts like morphine and exams
I’ve already taken
in
this city of God - - - all the stones
rose surprised before me as a flock of birds disturbed from their morning
feeding - - - the stigma of childhood
marking my palms and feet - - - orphaned
by pain - - - I felt nothing though I
attempted repair of the body’s summers through a kind of Christmas pageant - -
- then a swimming through the dream of
olive groves - - - then the quilting of
buried music into twelve gowns - - -
then the eating of worms - - -
then the gathering of incomplete births - - - and a series of flashbacks immaculate as the
white room of the ivory mathematics of Mary - - - we fell upon the placenta still pulsing like
a heart and gorged on it like a pack of wolves
///
we
shall be purified - - - we were promised
- - - we were soaked in rum and honey -
- - drunk as choirboys - - - the many anonymous eyes all over their
unnameable bodies and their backs made blank for punishment
one
day I was offered an advance cremation - - -
why wait I thought - - - let the
gross body fall away - - - let me save
the organs for later - - - let me fill
these jars I have inherited from my mother’s mother - - - let me empty them in that field down there -
- - let me visit the slums of the world
looking for the king’s trident
let
me bury my brothers who come endlessly from over that hill - - - who come like a line of ants - - - like a swarm of bees - - - like a ring of fire
///
from
the eastern gate to the western gate - - -
I
:::
made a womb out a sparrow’s nest
assembled every meal out of moss and the
scorned end of each hour
used my palm as a cutting board
wrote a child out of forbidden grammar -
- - a grimoire
a child of pure glamour - - - a child not to be looked at directly
a child to walk ahead and not look back
:::
orphaned myself every morning and every
night
let the wolves out of my mouth at noon
and swallowed them for dinner
never fell into despair or aporia
reused every letter as a frugal woman
was taught to do
dactylic hexametered several martial
epics while my husbands were away at the wars
:::
engraved a secret dossier on God and
buried it under the floorboards like a heart
finished him a suit of armor knit from
stinging nettles
abandoned all ghosts who entered me with
good intentions
the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan
No comments:
Post a Comment