Someone must’ve gone fetched him out, towed the drowned, wing-wrecked bird through a slick of his own feathery want, though, more likely, he passed out from knowing, and the falling distance made the surface turn hard to his body. It must’ve mattered to his father, who, winged himself, had to watch fishermen circle his son, like figures in a painting, pondering as if there were meaning in water. Is this any way to treat the ones who flee and wash ashore, prodding their bodies with toe, stick, a disbelieving finger? This morning, walking along the road, I found a hummingbird against the curb, marveled at the glasswork of its stillness, how the light was falling too, so I could see shifting green and blue, the tiny cage, the dark needle of its bill, the dark eyes the ants will carry away. I can’t say if it died from wanting too much or from finding what it wanted too much. Surely, Icarus had the heart of a hummingbird. If they revived him, would he have risen back into the sky, damaged wiser, or, bratty, simply blamed his crap wings? I nudged the bird with my shoe, not expecting, but half wishing, a startling burst through our myth-brightened world. But the boy who ODed in a Porta-Potty, was no bird at all. When his father found him, his sun-jonesing heart large from hovering, his friends—junk-caked, booze-skanked themselves—turned away, puked in a ditch, praying he’d break the surface of his misery. Even outside the funeral home, dark coats blocks long, dragging in suits they last wore at graduation, for some sliver of rachis and vane jutting out where wings might be, they do not want to die, they only want to feel less, less this. The way we, too, standing in a line of pity and scorn, curse all this away, we who love those who love the air, the sudden lift and veer.
Copyright © 2017 James Hoch. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Kenyon Review, November/December 2017
And now, having dismissed everyone as he
wishes he could dismiss his own dreams that make each
night restless—that same unswayable knowledge, and
the belief in it, that he is
king here, which means
being a stranger, at least outwardly, to even the least
trace of doubt—after all of this, the king has stepped
from the royal tent, is walking toward the sound
of water, where the river must be. There’s the river,
rivering south,
as rivers tend to. Beside the river,
two men are fucking. Young men. Almost too young
to even know about fucking, thinks the king, who can’t
help noticing how the men bring a somehow grace
to the business between them—a grace that some might
confuse with love. But the king
rarely makes mistakes,
which is to say, he knows mercy when he sees it. What
does mercy have to do with fucking? What does love
have to do with grace? What are dreams but the only
rivers memory knows how to make? There’s a kind of
music
to how the men routinely but unpredictably trade
places entering and withdrawing from each other. It’s as if
they’re singing a song that might go “I’m the king, no you’re
the king and I’m the river, no you’re the river.” On and on,
like that. Leave them; they do
no harm. The king making
his slow, insomnia-ed way back. The night dark but not dark
entirely: moonless, yes, but through the pines enough stars
still visible. Whoever goes there,
let me pass. Beneath
the brocaded cloak, each bead stitched to it by hand,
beneath the cloak of some more breathable, lighter fabric
beneath that, the king’s cock rests like tenderness itself
against the king’s left thigh. How soft the stars look.
From Star Map with Action Figures. Copyright © 2019 by Carl Phillips. Used with the permission of the poet.