Delirium was the last country she saw clearly.
Mounting its exotic, riven flanks
on the back of a patient fever,
she left with regret the land of her hosts—
divisions of snow, upended stone threaded with tracks
between the goatskin houses with goatskin beds—
then left too the regret.
For decades she’d taken pleasure in imposing
the first white profile (with its great spinster nose)
upon such places, barely named,
as lay a few days’ journey beyond fable,
uplands that bore no showy gold or ziggurat,
only the shallow marks of laboring generations,
the central campfires repeated deep in their eyes.
Past rocks tipped early out of the cradle of myth,
she finally became separated from her pack
with its twenty pencils, the notorious hat,
coins and aspirin, equally useless,
and yielded to discovery of one state
that lacks the primary luxuries: return,
and the safely delivered story.
In that time,
before the sun wore red and yellow feathers,
before the sky’s umbilicus parted,
the Machiguengas were people but so
were the animals, so were the plants,
so were the stars. Then Yabireri
breathed on this one and that
and made them toucans, cacao trees,
orchids, or giant otters.
Until Yabireri blew his breath
they were all people,
consuming granite, changing red light to sugar,
swallowing twelve-foot anacondas;
they were all people,
pushing each other’s eggs from the nest,
streaming white fire that travels after they die,
changing from male to female;
they were all people,
weaving houses of grasses and bright blue trash,
folding dewlaps away and turning from orange to brown,
lapping blood from the small wounds of sleepers,
rolling themselves in balls, eating hot sulfur;
they were all people.
Two stopped the spirit god
before he could change them all.
There were still people
to drink ayahuasca and rise to the spirits,
to knit barbs in wire and string it wide,
to write down endless numbers,
to look into fire and sing till their eyes hurt
and still sing, to dam rivers,
to slit the belly of a thirteen-year-old girl,
to tear a mountain open and let it rust,
to trace an eyebrow with a wondering thumb,
to make stories out of everything.
There were still people
Yabireri could not blow out.
He watched from where they left him,
impaled on a wooden stake
at the mouth of the sky.
Wind out of the north today, with the stench
from the towers across the Horn, where the emperor’s men
have packed the dead. I danced for a man last night
with black peas all over his arms. When I placed my hands
on the floor, reaching over my head, he began to scream.
Spilled red fish sauce, I think, ran over the table.
I took all the food I could carry.
Those the plague passes over are starving.
I dreamt of ortolans in a pastry nest,
woke to another slave bolting to drown his fever.
They say plum pickle wards it off, or lemons;
they say God sends it. I think it’s part of the world
that strikes and spares and never gives us the pattern.
Tertia, our best, went first.
They say the emperor prays all day.
Some say he is dying. He’s sent for me, nonetheless.
No chin, like a rat, and his small hands are never still,
but if any wine is left in the city he’ll have it,
olives and figs to push between my breasts,
perhaps little birds in a pie with fruit in their beaks
or spitted with their eyes open.
Who started this none of them can say,
not even those with tongues,
but families hear of the angel that troubles the waters
and deposit their last hopes beside the pool
in ragged rings.
And when the water ripples, what a surge
among the patients, hunched over their pain
in starting-line positions,
the broad-shouldered lame, the sniffing blind,
those clutching their bowels, their sores, their wild heads,
even the limbless ones—
but it’s only a frog, or breeze, or a feather
fallen from great height.
They settle again, and continue to endure
belief in an angel who might hold such a race
and award but one prize.
A small mercy that it was a moonless night
when the angel of curiosity, meaning no harm,
stirred the pool with one long finger,
startled to taste
how salt it is, and warm.
At first the keepers amused themselves,
pairing Mondrian with the zebras, El Greco with giraffes,
but as rumors of the enemy’s approach
grew heads and teeth, sleepless curators
tried to run with straw-stuffed crates
and thrust their arms into dangerous cages
till half the museum was hidden at the zoo.
Throughout the occupation, the animals kept their secrets.
But their boredom was more stubborn
than a handful of hasty nails.
The elephant delicately picked straw
from the bust of Akhenaten;
the blue-cheeked mandrill bared its fangs
at the rival color patches of Rousseau.
Brown bears bedded down for the winter
in a cave lined with peaceable Rembrandts.
At night the slow loris watched
with its everlastingly startled eyes
as the aye-aye touched
its wire-thin long third finger
to a rosy Renoir chin.
In the reptile house a flying gecko
established that its purple-brown toes
adhered to Raphael’s angels as to any wall,
and the Indian long-nosed tree snake
tested its rare binocular vision
and the whisper of its ventral scales
on the torso of an Apollonian youth.
As supplies ran short, one keeper discovered
he didn’t mind his koalas gnawing
the frames of Renaissance triptychs. Another
covered his face and cursed his cowardly hands
as drunken soldiers played target practice,
as the white rhino knelt, taking the bullets
that could have pierced the Vermeer.
A month later the broken aviary emptied,
deserted by the orange minivet, the mandarin ducks,
the blue-backed fairy bluebird,
but the sociable weaverbirds stayed
at their communal tree, and threaded
the thatch of their nest with canvas strands
to which clung flecks of paint,
while next door in the butterfly house,
the ripening eggs of Morpho,
Papilio, Melanitis, and the rest prepared
to hatch their ravenous larvae.
Like him, she is old. Her neck curves like the violin’s,
whose long harsh kiss shows on her jaw when she turns
to the tuning fork she’s spanked on her knee,
her pursed lips drawing in the long thin A.
“Beethoven tonight? Mozart, Haydn? Brahms?”
she gloats absently over the sheets to his usual shrug;
he goes back to touching the cello strings with his thumbs.
She lifts her bow, and its hair falls loose from the frog
like a girl’s. “Ach. It’s always something, isn’t it?
How we play such fragile things, I don’t know,
they could fall apart in our hands.” With her second bow
she tunes again. He doesn’t see her rosin it;
bent over the cello’s shoulder he has the sense
of remembering Berlin, the night a bomb
buried the bridegroom and all but one of his friends,
the night he knelt outside his gaping home
and heard the grand piano fall five floors—
heard its last five monstrous chords
that blotted out for years all the Bach he knew.
“Mozart, then,” he says, and so they play.
Naked and obedient in the moonless clearing
she rises on tiptoe, lifts her arms wide,
swallows her instructor’s bitter syrup,
and vomits her entrails into the copper dish.
Loosed, lightened, with birdwings sprouting
so fast they hurt, she can barely stay
for the message of the invisible ones;
she carries it screaming high
through night air full of devils that brush her skin.
Mother, Mother—it is too late to pray
since she stood forty days forty nights half drowned
under Thraiguén waterfall and her true baptism
was plundered away and she begged for the bits
of toasted bread they held out on pointed sticks.
Most beautiful sister of a Brujería initiate
(who killed his best friend, who flayed the corpse
and made a vest of its skin that glows in the dark,
who passed other tests), she was chosen.
She begged them, the male witches.
Voladora, her brother whispers so no one else can hear,
Voladora, tonight. She walks to the forest.
Meets the dish. She flies screaming.
The Brujería, they change themselves to animals,
they enter men’s dreams and drive them mad.
They alter the courses of rivers,
spread sickness that has no cure.
They injure whom they choose. Voladora, tonight.
She mounts the reeking velvet air,
lunges over the trees, unbalanced, high
where the weak lights scattered below can’t see her.
Every secret message she bears
is a chain locked tight to her throat, a medallion
weight on her breast, red hot. Thirty years
she has done their bidding just so she can crouch
at dawn by the copper basin, furtively
wolf down her intestines,
and be human again, to the eye.
The poisonous night-moths fold away
and a bird speaks of dawn. She circles the place
where the bloody dish still shines. Is she hungry?
How long since she has been hungry?
What does she need with those innards, what need
for the form of that beautiful girl?
Let them look for her with the short-eared owl,
the carrion hawk, the mockingbird.
She flies silently. They will never get her back.
The red-eyed pigeons disdain my suet
and chalky bread that once, as I remember,
enthralled them and all their cousins. “Rats with wings,”
sniffs the old lady around whose sensible shoes
they bowed smooth heads, in times gone by,
to a semicircle of peanuts. “Rats with wings.”
Now exotic dinners are spread wherever they go:
clots in the streets, puddles and pockets
in the dirt, in the buckling grass,
of everything we let go, pass by, lose.
Three miners headed west to peck at any rich stain in the rocks.
(So say the brown letters one of them sent his grandson.)
Starving on the edge of a desert,
they found in a shallow cave some kind of molasses,
a chunky brittle secreted by stone. Like manna.
They ate till they were full at last,
and a little sick later. That candy was a pack-rat midden,
grass twigs leaves seeds cactus-spines and feathers,
bugs and pebbles, all ambered for the fossil record
with decades of pack-rat pee.
This is our nonelectronic diary now,
to go with the archives of car parts and mattress springs:
waste, all kinds, escaped and mingled in mats
becoming one mat, one flow of tepid lava.
Crumbs, tobacco, toothpaste, phlegm,
sticky half-inches in foam cups and reeking bottles,
sugar, ketchup, vials, diamonds,
unguents, tabloid drool, cough syrup, blood.
Unmentionable or unnoticed, in such volume
fat cockroaches can’t keep up.
Rasped with stinking salt, the tongue
makes for itself a fugitive sweetness, like green
one sees after too much red. Stare at this dumping ground
long enough and angels appear in the sky.
But no one really minds his own smell,
or gnawing a bone if the spit on it is hers.
So sludge of gossip philosophy pudding and lint
lips at our ankles; later, when there are more of us,
we can mark its tides on our walls. And in the wilderness,
the fires of abandoned coal mines burning forty years
will be fed, or slaked at last.
Little Clark, scuffing the toes of his Keds in the dirt,
lost in boredom wide as Nebraska, looked down.
Saw a pebble pinned under the arch of his foot,
saw earthworms tinily mouthing their way grain by grain,
tyrannosaur bones, articulate, spine strained back,
a seething fiery darkness of molten rock,
and the chipped red-painted sole of a Chinese clog.
Then the other sky. Wherever he looked after that for weeks
he saw space, the black outer space behind even the sun.
Needing to watch girls, he tried not to burn when he peeked
but saw past her underwear, past her secret skin
to viscera, ribs, and the writhing of her heart.
And saw a first egg begin its calm descent
before his steely focus came apart.
Later, with glasses, with practice by accident mostly,
he saw how his dried parents wanted him bound,
changing their tires forever, how compact Lois
was an angular mess of desire, and looking down
from Metropolis windows saw onion-skin slides stained
with lurid angers, gloating, love in vain,
the black familiar nodules in a villain’s brain.
Now the curved lens’s magnified rainbow reflection
shows him straggling eyebrow hairs, the step of the crow
on one side, the stare half an inch away
of his open blue-black blank eye.
This is not a country that needs me to speak for it
This is not a country with one great wound
at which I can cry out
and be heard
This is no place small enough for a cradle,
no green palm of a hand, embraceable chain of red
mountains
It will not condense, it will not yield to a single music,
no two of its horizons take the same line
This is not a country that counts me
when it goes to its storehouse to count,
when it dials up majority wedges of pie,
when it tunes in its screens with their Nielsen boxes
Not my mother, not my father,
scatterer of sisters and brothers
among the prairie-dog holes, the skyscraper ant farms
It’s too big, too built to bury love in
The love spilled on it, viscous white, sticky red,
won’t soak in—scours the mere ground
and bears it downhill
Dry rock lies by swollen rivers
and the dry rocks groan
and the rivers shout
and sometimes they’re on TV
This is not a country that asks me to speak
When the season comes, unquestioningly
they abandon the ocean and thread themselves
through the mouths of their native rivers—
the males in their double-breasted suits,
their necktie stripes of steelhead, rainbow,
cutthroat, Dolly Varden, eastern brook;
the females in stern skirts and silky blouses.
Knees together, arms against their sides,
they swim against a current for the first time and the last,
convulsing up ladders, hurling themselves at rapids.
They forget to be tired, forget to eat.
The sunny, unsalt water flies apart on their padded shoulders.
By the time they reach the waters of their infancy,
their good leather shoes are scuffed, their briefcases battered,
buttons missing, hair undone. Sides heaving in and out.
Here the females deposit piles of paperwork
for the males to cover with blizzards of contracts and memos.
They are finished. In the quiet shallows they hover,
then lay their meager flesh on the riffled gravel.
Mouths wide open. Eyes wide open.
It does not look like rest. But they are
mostly washed away before
the children arise in thousands like snow falling upward
and careen toward the sea in their little toboggan bodies,
without an idea in the world that deep in their brains some
kink,
some microscopic hook, will make them want
to put on business clothes and swim upstream.
The polar bear comes to devour you.
Your destiny at last. You draw the door wide
open—he stands taller than the frame—
and fall back before him, come in, come in,
respectfully await his embrace.
I knew you would find me. I’m ready.
Surprisingly ready, even your gladness
stiff with expectation, as if with cold.
He will carry you, crushed and engulfed, north to the pack ice,
will hold you beneath his heart all the starving months,
his muscles sipping you just to keep moving—
the trace of you released through his nostrils
the only warmth to rise for aching miles around.
You’ve waited for him since you saw Thor swimming.
The Lincoln Park Zoo male in dead summer
took the false pool in his arms. Below
the surface on one side, a small blue window
showed him in oval, and how perfectly
he did not care that you watched
his mass in flight, a mountain bending,
a planet with blowing hair.
Of this movement, grace is an imitation.
Of his black eyes without depth
in the wedge of his face,
arrogance is a shadow.
You heard of his wicked ways:
baiting his cage with flung peanuts, pretending
sleep for hours till a duped squirrel
flickered near his paw and was struck by lightning.
Later, “napping” by the keeper’s lost shoe.
On the ice where you will be going
there is no boredom, only expanse, and cold
too cold for smell. There are two kinds of taste:
the blade of the wind, and salt flesh
of anything that swims and is slow, which
the bear tastes no more than
he tastes his own tongue. There are
blue white and yellow white; nothing is dark
but what moves and is edible, or
what moves unbreathable under the ice.
The wonder before you, the throat cantilevered
in uncaressable fur. He drops to four paws
and opens his heavy mouth.
His teeth are brown stumps in a reek
of banana peel, rancid pork rind, battery acid.
The garbage bears of Churchill
live in the dump. They skip the nine-month fast,
rip open their stinking half-warm prey’s
loose black plastic skin.
He shuffles around your spread hands to the couch
and, as you begin your miserable shiver,
drops. Sighs. Appears to watch TV.
One thousand miles inland from the original tree,
one in the box of leathery glowing globes begins
earlier than the others a web of brown lines on its skin.
Inside, the pale intricate membranes stretch and toughen.
They secretly drink the juice. The close-held seeds go dry.
The ball is less and less a ball, its flat spots sunken.
No more nourished or nourishing, the tender polyps
turn acid in their envelopes packed around the starry center,
decline from gorgeous orange to thin yellow, fermenting.
Superior fruits prefer to be removed from such
corruption, lest it prove contagious to the touch
despite its clear connection to some lack of moral fiber,
whereas the sagging browning merely overripe
may hate it simply, as the dim the blind,
consumingly, as the halt may hate the lame,
and in its powdery final rot and transmutation,
the closer the pale blue orange draws to its dusty cave-in
the more urgent its desire for something else to blame.
Am I then to understand
that with every matins’ sociable embalming of the armpit
molecular aluminum insinuates itself, through sheared follicles,
bright fleck by bright invisible fleck, into the tiny tender kinks
of capillaries? slides along their permeable wisps
into the jostling rivers of depleted scarlet doughnuts and white
ghosts,
into a hectic Amazon, through endlessly wrung chambers,
out the roaring wide aorta, rising blandly through the neck
by ever subtler pulses toward the tingling gray curd
all flushed with its matted electrical storms? and lays
a glinting finger on one sparked synaptic mouth
that hushes. Whose voice may never be missed.
A number, a name, the Latin for greed,
clopping upstairs that March day in Florence with brand-new
clogs,
the blister they raised. But supposing senility
takes the brain in its soft retriever’s mouth
and carries it to be gutted, supposing all
the recent layers plucked away and memory’s microscopic
doors flung wide
for the oldest to come forth: Would third-grade Ruth be missing
and unmissed, or Mary or Brenda, with random trivial
comrades,
or would the whole host stagger out, one missing legs, another
clothes,
with synthetic pearls for eyes or carrot noses?
Or would each corridor dead-end on a scaly tinfoil mirror
showing nothing but the scowling smear
of some old unfamiliar woman’s face?
Up and down its red and blue chutes
my defective blood bumps: Oreos and gumballs one hour,
famished soap bubbles the next. Christmas survived,
I find with the special sugarless candy’s
mild laxative effect time to wonder
at what all it takes to keep me up.
The patches and stitches, the little glucose computer,
plastic packaging every day to the landfill,
and needles, a whole iron mine
could have run dry for me. The operations,
don’t-touch bins all heaped with trays and
tubes and rubber gloves and miles of gauze.
Where it all comes from. The truckers, line workers,
underprivileged South American harvesters,
and patent holders that put together
one lousy just-in-case Snickers bar
that maybe one time saved my life.
And don’t forget last year’s electrodes,
stuck to my leg, the centuries of science
reviving one blue foot. Years from now
I’ll be walking around on plastic legs
with a battery-powered heart and silicon eyes,
eating imported apricots and flash-frozen
chicken hormones. I’ll think, again:
In an Ice Age cave I’d be dead.
In a Roman villa with household gods and servants
I’d be dead. In a Gothic wheatfield town,
even before the plague came I’d be dead.
As for how I’d make out if some terrorist explosion
disassembles the running water and highways
and burns the air, well, I guess
I’d place in the race to die. Last one left,
I figure, will be that weevil yesterday
that walked out the door of my microwave
right after I’d done the potatoes.
But here I am alive in a brand-new sweater,
using things, using things up. Mom asked,
those times I wouldn’t eat my peas,
or sneaked away from the dishes to watch TV,
What makes you so special?
Meant, I suppose, to deny it,
I never did. And still say, I don’t know.
Did he make you scream?
In the middle of ripping shoulder meat
from a dead mound did you rock back weak on your haunches,
yellow eyes puddling cataract blue,
a pulse parting your messy lips?
No blinds drawn,
no struggle bulging over a narrow sofa,
no face-to-face reflection of cosmic bewilderment and glee;
he didn’t gasp Faster Now God and no salt drops
fell from his armpit onto your breast.
Your arms too short
to reach anything, and the teasing air
open in every direction he might have gone.
Carrion no longer the sole desire
of your thickest muscles.
The moon so close
and the wild noise of insect millions
had nothing to do with your hunt through the cycad dark
to see if it was his teeth you needed
champing shut through your spine.
Got itself called a musk ox, never mind that half the year and
more
its great Roman muzzle can only breathe ice and blow smoke.
Tell you another: These great stamping chunks of gristle and
blubber
and hoarded hairy warmth are partial entirely to salad—
hearts of Arctic grass and willow tips. All ravenous winter
their round cow eyes strain over the ice for lichens and moss;
they chop their frozen vegetables from the snow
with hooves like patient gray plow-breaking stones.
Yes, they’ve come in for their share of guff
for those Fifties-hairdo horns. But they don’t laugh much.
They’re busy pumping all the blood it takes to live under half a
sun.
When wolves come streaking in fire-tongues over the freeze,
they circle tight. Barricading the babies and mothers,
their bleating heart, and lowering like the sky, the old bulls and
cows
kill wolves, kill wolves—with one bludgeoning pulse
strike out at last at an enemy they can see.
Walking home from my powerless car
I pass through a dozen supper smells, each
more promising than anything I’ve ever cooked.
But then my neighbors long since left me behind.
They know just how to use sage and cumin.
They change their own spark plugs, prune shrubs, and feed roses.
In that garage a woman is caning a chair,
tight straw stars. My chin recedes,
my knuckles scrape the street I’m crossing.
My skills come from the wrong past.
I know how, in a team of two,
to bring down a marriage heavy with years,
cut out its tongue and liver, flay the skin,
break its mastodon limbs across,
and suck the bitter marrow;
you can last awhile like that.
I know how to forage.
I know how to sleep in the cold.
Where the bladderwort and water lily
give way to bulrushes and pickerelweed,
and cattail heads nod hugely high,
every day for a thousand thousand
she keeps her eyes in the pond,
under the wind. Everything here
is as cool as everything else.
In the filtered visibility
she can set her chin in the muck
and submit her gills to the endless wet feed,
her skin to the close, slack hold all over.
No questions. Everything here is here.
Now and now and now.
She doesn’t know
why this time she pushes past the surface tension
and wimples up the minute incline
on jellied stumps. She doesn’t know
how far to the loblolly pines or what they are.
How heavy her body, wobbling on the peat
without support, in a shower of dry infrared.
So many edges. She feels a pocket
flex inside her neck, she gapes
at the scoured entry of demanding air.
I sank right down, it was a skill more needful,
more evident than swimming,
I wrapped all my three-fingered claws
around the rocks of the bottom.
No well-meaning dredge would get me,
or the cold hands of delicate scuba divers.
At drowning I failed; it turned out I knew how
to breathe under fathoms of pressure
that held my eyes closed, that worked in my fissures and
washed some parts of me loose,
and the cold that would not kill me kept the rest
from rotting away.
It took more time than death, but the whale I sank
to be swallowed by I swallowed,
and surfaced, not your tombstone after all, not an island,
my gray hulk steaming, purple and green
with disease that means
survival, and barnacle mouths in dazed Os all over my skin.
The predictable bell-curve brontosaurus,
dumb with tons and years, raises its head.
Extinction has come at last. No more swallowing rocks
to grind the endless meal of green needles.
No more subsiding to sleep, a carrion mountain,
under the bowed head of hunger on two legs.
No more need to love the Jurassic.
The little face lifted on the long brown throat
sags, it widens, grows lips and eyelids,
whiskers, fleshy spines, warts and spangles.
New bones, new colors open in its skin,
new toes flex and take hold.
New claws, oh it scratches the itch on its back at last
and the back sprouts feathers, the feathers have feathers,
the feathers on feathers grow feathers; gladly intricate
and hard to see as anything living,
its infinite edges intimate with air,
the dragon unfurls its wings peacock and tangerine,
leaves the ground ruby murex indigo,
lashes its fractal tail.
Bacteria live here where the river flows
acid and erratic, chocolate one hour,
navy beans the next. They form
little mats of excess, let go, float,
resume in a similar place the same
busy extraction of all they need,
mining or feeding. They don’t take,
only change it. Absorb and split,
absorb and split. Making gas
too small to be bubbles,
not their concern. Not their concern
that there is no light here,
scarcely air, that all water is polluted.
And what matter if their continent
discovers alone an abandoned
North Dakota movie drive-in
and sits on the merry-go-round
for one whole hour crooning John Denver songs,
or heaps on a motel bed
before the Hitchcock television
with three music majors and a pre-med
and laughs to crying.
If generations hence it receives a glib final letter,
their wallow is slightly more bilious.
If generations hence at last it rests
an appendage on a desired knee,
they are swamped in unaccustomed
sweetness, which kills some,
encourages others. They don’t strike back.
They need my life too.
At first when the end of the heavy gold rope
filled and moved down my windpipe
I thought I might be supposed to choke,
but instead this too was breathing, only better,
and drinking, too, or eating—it didn’t matter—
the heavy new surrounding that made me lighter,
the thick suspense whose pressure just matched mine,
that didn’t dissolve, or muddy, or settle in sediment down
but rippled, caramel, on and on and on and on and on.
I thought I might die of foolishness at last,
being fed every time I opened my mouth, my lashes
held beautifully shut by pure molasses,
and a smile on all my lips that wouldn’t go
because of a furtive belief that somehow
all this syrup for me was from me, too,
in spite of my own spite whispering I ought to
feel undeserving and moreover trap-caught, or
at least crave my old cold cabbage and thin salt water.
Helpless as an apricot in heavy sun
blushing into softness
or a sliced strawberry
drawing sugar into its flesh,
she turns on the couch to face east,
his house, she eats the limp scraps
of honeysuckle dropped on the chocolate box,
drifts over midnight wet grass
as if drowned by a single star—
feels a cool leaf edge, unmelting, draw her arm.
Puts all five fingers into a rose
and makes it open too.
Perhaps love means no more to the millennium
than saying, “I was there, it’s true,
one bright drop fell from the mulberry onto the rose,”
or, “I saw this green branch bow and shake
when a squirrel chose it and no other,”
and perhaps the apparent favor of the universe
is no more than the crocodile grin of a Doberman
breathing hard and about to be hungry,
or the sun that makes a thousand prisms
wink in a blackened gull’s petroleum coat,
but the racket and glow in this body, whose fluids
you have changed all to corn oil by kissing four times
the end of my thumb, knows otherwise,
and the very odds, billion to one, against great joy
confess its occasional visitation,
if not its relation to the clear brown band
around each of your tender pupils, or to
the note you just made in the margin of Insect Life.
To Drosophila melanogaster is vouchsafed honey.
To us, eternal verities, and this kiss.
The eyes of these two fish imprinted in stone
look sad, small rusty sidelong blots
on traces of their bodies curved
like a question asked two times.
Theophrastus explained
that when the flood rose fish swam over the land
and laid their eggs, so once it subsided
their puzzled children
hatched in rock and were mineral.
They swam with difficulty,
whereas the giant red-haired Siberian mole,
big as two tents,
fairly flew underground, slicing
through permafrost as if through curd
with its terrible ivory weapons.
Only a blunder could stop it,
so the cold hunters said,
if it dug too far and erupted
like a mountain from the snow:
When it saw sunlight it died.
The trunk, the surprised splayed forefeet,
were eaten by wolves.
When I was eight reading dinosaur books
I didn’t know any dead people outside pictures;
when I was nineteen I still hadn’t met you,
thought I knew loss and didn’t.
With you I learned to breathe stone,
to swallow Siberia.
Some days you played the intricate scales
that made your thin skin. Some days
you were only a silent roar
with impossible bright red hair.
But how you have changed me,
how you will always have changed me.
Don’t you know better than anyone
how I still try to be your wife, your discoverer,
your frustrated music, your life, your violin?
—how I have to go sometimes
and stand on corners,
hold up my little slab of marked limestone,
my only surviving sketch
of you rotting in winter,
and say to passersby, You see, you see,
you must see why I loved him.
Tonight the backhand sweep of passing headlights
does not rake the front rooms too deeply
and the spot on the ceiling will not be a spider,
and though there is never nothing to be afraid of
the window is mended, the laundry has swallowed
the invisible broken glass from my heaped soft clothes.
Just now I do not need to walk through the house
touching, not quite trusting, the things we have left—
the turquoise heart, the gold pen, my grandad’s viola—
or checking the clock, the doorknob, the eyes
of the stove, the bathroom taps
(the tarnished christening cup, the bone horse).
No one is walking where we have no attic.
No one will see the holes eaten in my suit
if I don’t wear it. (The cedar box, the tin box inside,
the drawing inside of a face.) Meanwhile the sheets of our bed
lie on us so square and clean, we feel like guests.
But my hand is on your arm across my ribs.
We will get up in the morning. We can afford to hear
the traveling distant groan and crash
of night trains in their ungainly coupling
and the grassblade net of crickets just outside
where the little rags of petunias are ready
to be purple and white one more day.
Lassie’s left eye, rumor has it, was given to science;
the right one, at some charity auction,
went to a mystery bidder for thousands of dollars.
(Or maybe the other way around.)
So what was their last sight, the crocodile going for Timmy,
or the canine fleshpots of Hollywood?
Stupid questions pass the time
as he drives around Lincoln County for med school money,
harvesting eyes from people who died at home.
Like, is it true the retina keeps
a print of the last thing it saw?
The car picks up speed down bony old hills full of snakes,
four eyes jiggling behind him in the cooler,
and he wishes Bluebird Hamilton or Junior Sims
would pull him over, and have to look—
let their greater disgust wipe his away.
He left the faces closed and looking peaceful;
they don’t have to wake to any more surprises.
Good thing only the corneas are transplanted,
what if a retina recipient blinked
and saw the heavy green flank of Mr. Fee’s tractor
rolling onto his chest, or every time
he shut his eyes it was Mr. Story’s nurse
pointing a spoonful of mush at his mouth like a dagger.
He drives the back road for a change, but outside Pearl
it’s nothing but slow vines taking down houses,
and what if he skids off the curve beyond Coldwater—
he’d like to see Bluebird’s and Junior’s faces,
supposing they couldn’t help but notice
the back walls of his two eyes and all four in the box
glowing with the robes of Jesus.
Mozart sighs and rubs his nose
and heaves his feet from bed.
He bends to glare at a blistered toe,
and eighth notes spill from his head.
Beset by chill and dustballs,
they fail to catch his ear.
They twitch the bedclothes’ trailing edge:
Constanze does not hear.
Mistaken for bright beetles,
they are flattened by the maid,
who sweeps them to the gutter,
where they try to modulate;
then, sprouting into sixteenths,
they imitate black birds
that dot across the sky and sing
with neither end nor words—
but since they move in straight lines,
they stray out with the stars
and sound with other tuneless tones
beyond all staves and bars.
Only the animal, from its laughingstock height,
looks at them without change of expression,
stuffed and a little dusty. They look back,
the joined Siamese boys, their connection bare
between their twin white shirts, their inside arms
crossed to each other’s shoulders.
Chang thinks, If everyone looked that strange
we’d still be selling duck eggs. Eng:
If everyone looked like that but us,
they’d pay to see our short necks.
Behind them a lurking reporter scribbles,
“don’t talk much to each other.”
The giraffe holds its lumpy head high, as though
it might still spy acacias.
The brothers, wordless, turn as one to leave.
Back to the boardinghouse, back to the usual
evening compromises, when one wants to drink
and drink and fall to bed early, and one
craves a long night of cards and cigars.
In their room, beneath some stranger’s tread,
they maneuver among their boots, umbrellas, canaries,
and retie their silk cravats. Shadows of specks
on the lamp’s dirty chimney dapple their ligature.
They hurry on downstairs to order oysters.
All night behind locks the dry giraffe imagines
bending its goitrous knees, its mouth reaching water.
Probably God doesn’t do it this way.
God’s dinner-plate galaxies are nearly unbreakable
and twirl steadily, without the support
of any sticks we can see,
whereas this man in tails and brilliantine
bolts around the stage, sweating and grinning,
his zigzag attention in fifty places at once,
to twiddle this stick, that stick, and on to the next.
He nearly bumps, he never bumps his tables.
The audience loves it, almost as if
they love him, as long as he keeps moving
and all his white plates overhead,
boring unlikely holes in the air
like notes of music.
Long ago he almost died of tedium
in a desert river city, before he grasped
that a mind will balance more gracefully
on the unsatisfactory stick of a human body
if it spins.
Perhaps God, meanwhile, is more like Ed Sullivan,
poker-faced in the wings,
watching with a kind of wonder
things he knew would happen.
Saturday Borodin answered the door
where Rimsky-Korsakov towered, blue specs on his forehead,
his arms full of tubas and oboes; they blundered in
through relatives, students, and cats,
through the samovar steam,
the wide firm chords of Borodin’s wife’s piano;
and they chewed on reeds
all weekend, twiddled keys and strained their lips
till Monday, when through the door went Borodin:
Chemistry Professor
to acquire new exotic stains, to fascinate his classes
without a single explosion since the first,
whose little glass shark’s teeth still sometimes
grow out of his arm; casually he might pluck one out
late at night while the B minor keeps proliferating,
new black formulas opening over the page—
a suspension of flutes in solution, precipitate cellos,
a sudden expanding solid of orchestra chorus,
later a French horn pure as oxygen—
under the small lamp, a cat between his feet.
Nothing ignoble about this precision, this resolve
to eat half the apple, to choose and aim
for Point C between dim A and extravagant B
for Berlioz, not so far away, raving with love,
staggering half dressed over the fields beyond Paris
ghastly with grief, one smitten howl mounting the next
and all for Harriet Smithson, while his friends—
Chopin coughing, Liszt now late for the night’s assignation,
Mendelssohn smiling at the sky—attempt his rescue,
wander in circles one meteor might erase
past tall oaks pregnant with mistletoe,