As-yet-untitled Poem about (surprise!) bees
Attendants! Admit it: you cleave
To song for safety, where
Silence signals, where drone displaces
more than sound. People who make
illustrated sheets of us
Cannot think of the close dark, the
Pinhole shriek, the photo-negative
Of inside, looking out.
Attendants!
At your threshold, find
A wafer of flesh suspended in water
And if it’s offerings you’re after
Here’s I-don’t-know-what-else,
Here, from the backseat of a
Dusty Honda, I give you
Fuzz of white moth
A grounded
Single engine
Gutted prey on the floor of
Your luminous gold mausoleum
Where you call for it, find the
Illusion of fur: a fine white
Grit on your waxen floor
Favored by bears for its lipidy
savor. I live where the light
Starts, guard the hinterlands that
Lie between our ordered
Cells and that bountiful riot outside.
Harvest
Here I am, dismantling the bloodless cat,
all muscle and sinew and bones reed-thin,
bones that beg to be snapped.
Driving my fingers down to wrench back
hanks of tendoned layers.
All the time the cat, unfamiliar with pain’s
mute groundswell, regards me sourly.
Revulsion bests me. He shakes me off and
labors away, solid furry body
teetering on a nude spindle of jointed bones.
Here is my companion curled on a cotton
Lozenge while, dreaming,
I resculpt Mackerel
from the clay I made of him.
Here I am, stooped over a steel tub
In which, methodical and absolute,
I push him under by the scruff. I watch
for a struggle but he makes none.
Now the dreamer enters the dream.
Here is the calculated gleam of a harvester,
O won’t this be a great experiment to feed his limp body
through the meat grinder’s opened smile
And of the white meal he made, I crafted
another of him, and even awake I can
admire what a perfect likeness it was,
that inert replica of my friend.
Here is the genesis of
the calculated gleam: dead on the table.
The cat’s busy heart halved,
then flattened. Taking up
a pair of instruments, I practiced
embroidery on his opened belly.
Here we are not journeying
through a dream, though the unconscious
browses as if at market: inspecting
produce for nuggets of bitter and bundles of savory.
These it will keep in a paper bag until they ripen,
Serve back to me just before they
Turn. Lying taut atop the organs are ruddy strips of muscle
And clouding over, weather systems of fat.
Here are inroads I made through them with purple thread.
While I practice my slip stitch on the skin layer,
A tug against line
and two sheaves of flesh cleave together
Knife edge of spite. A dream can be a medium
where the soul channels joy, such as in flight,
but these are not those. Meet mine, dreams meant to
exorcise, the clean eradication of flawed self
the literate shriek, the weekly dre
Like a defective purgatory no one
remembers the point of, or how to turn it off.
Like being hazed by one’s
needs. By human practice. Which
can change.
Michael O’Brien
What was there to bring me to delight but to love and be loved?
I declared, and immediately rejected this. For instance:
a man I loved once liked to hurt women and would tell me
what he did to his lovers. The sight of a woman’s slight hips
as she was knocked over a television might give delight. Or the way
bones sounded in skin that bumped or scraped against a wall.
He used to claim he could hear things like this, not
the scratch of a woman’s back on a wall, but actual
bone rubbing muscle, skin, joint, the sound
as if sticks rattled in cloth. It frightened him, he said, he found himself
pushing other women to prove he couldn’t really hear the sound.
And I loved him. I loved forgiving him. I must admit this
though he never laid a hand on me,
I knew enough about this kind of loss.
There were more significant things
to demand from the world. Such as how
a word could call up more than violence, an idea, person, become
reality with only the finest limitations
of meaning. Such as monster, perhaps,
or grave, or delicious. I could say, for instance, that this man
was a delicious monster with his strap-colored hair and soft mouth
though where does that place me
in the universe of word? Perhaps you could say I
was the monster, searching not for where rivers ran but to the source
of rivers, the frozen nugget of an idea of river: so cold
it almost burns the rock around it. I was the one willing to sacrifice
so many others of my kind; I could listen for hours
to his stories of women whose bones itched within them
and I all I could think was hand, eye, mouth as if to say the words
was to take his fingers in my mouth, to suck
the warm pink nails between my teeth, or lick the egg taste
from his eye with my tongue. These were more real to me
than the fact he would cry out on the phone or in my bedroom
where we would talk. He would cry and all I could think was
More, let my thighs be another casing for you
if this is the kind of grave you want. I almost thought grace. I almost
gave in once, but, and this is the truth, he was afraid of me. I
was the coldness of rivers, he said, I was the source
and when he looked down at me lying on the sheets rumpled
like ruined skin he called me his destroyer.
Perhaps the real question in the world is not
what to love, but how to forgive.
What does it take for the monstrous
to be delightful in the eye of God? As if beauty itself
wasn’t also obscene — a hand really fleshed claw, a peony
a flowering of blood. Or perhaps a word is really all it signifies, all
we can trust in fact; to name a thing
is to make it so. When I called this man a man, you must believe
he became one for me. The source of the river,
not its oceangrasp. What happened to the man I loved
is that eventually he choked a woman almost to death.
We weren’t speaking then. Even I, it seems, have my limits.
But I can imagine how he would have told me he could hear her spine
crying out to him, an accusation of the flesh. What more is there
but to love like this and be loved? he asked me once.
You are my source of delight,
