I used to think my body craved 
annihilation. An inevitability, 
like the slow asphyxiation 
of the earth. Yoked to this body 
by beauty, its shallow promises 
I was desperate to believe, 
too fearful to renounce my allegiance 
even with its hand closing 
around my throat. When I chose 
myself, I chose surrender. God 
is the river that remakes me 
in its image. I didn’t know what 
was waiting on the other side. 
I swam through it anyway. 

I knew I was a god
when you could not
agree on my name

& still, none you spoke
could force me to listen
closer. Is this the nothing

the antelope felt when
Adam, lit on his own
entitling, dubbed family,

genus, species? So many
descendants became
doctors, delivered

babies, bestowed bodies
names as if to say it is to make it
so. Can it be a comfort between

us, the fact of my creation?
I was made in the image
of a thing without

an image & silence, too,
is your invention. Who prays
for a god except to appear

with answers, but never
a body? A voice? If I told you
you wouldn’t believe me

because I was the one
to say it. On the first day
there was no sound

worth mentioning. If  I, too,
am a conductor of air, the only
praise I know is in stereo

(one pair—an open hand & closed
fist—will have to do). I made
a photograph of my name:

there was a shadow in a field
& I put my shadow in it. You
can’t hear me, but I’m there.

First they called me “it,” and then, ignorant of how my people
use this word, they mashed up the meager nouns
they had for gender and called me “the goy,” and said
to not be one or the other was to be nothing.
It ate the grass it was shoved in, knelt at salt licks.
It took the barbs and kicks and crushed them into
fur and leather. Oiled and burnished, it made those
halves into one galloping body. Horse and rider.
The centaur endured the school-day, cruel gray rag, filth-
stiffened. The boys and girls who fit so easily in their costumes
looked like stick figures, crude and two dimensional.

Dante already knew, it read later. In The Inferno, in the seventh
circle of hell, centaurs guard the river Phlegethon, one of Hades’
five rivers. Phlegethon: river of fire, river of boiling blood,
which boils forever the souls of those who commit violence
against their neighbors. Centaurs guard the edges, shooting
arrows at any of these sinners who try to move to the shallows.

When sometimes I wish I’d had a boyhood, I remember those
days instead, my four muscled legs. I was seven feet tall then,
riding myself, carrying myself. A centaur is never lonely.