Parable of the Unclean Spirit

You can’t remember what they did to you. Your loneliness isn’t welcome here, you know, but still you walk the dream-lit village, looking for someone gentle enough. There must be an animal trapped under your shirt, you think, because little claws scratch against your chest and you throb there, but you're afraid to look because looking means remembering. You ask a man passing on the road to lift your shirt and check and he retches at what he sees, says the flesh there overflows, as if grinding its own meat, that strips of skin curl away from the wound like rot mushrooms growing on a tree, and he can't help you, you make him sick, he says, he has to go now, so you wander some more until you reach the gate, which is the end of who you could have been, the end of the dream of your body made full with starmilk, propelled by a heart of sea anemone. You’ll be hungry forever if you stay here, trying to hide your secret mouth from all this light. Before you can cross the gate into that dark valley, you must look at yourself. You can think of other words for red: crimson, cherry, scarlet. But there's no other name for blood, no name for a shame like this, its hiss of pain when you press your finger to it, the sweet stain it leaves on your fingertip. You just have to taste it.

Combustion

If a human body has two-hundred-and-six bones
and thirty trillion cells, and each cell
has one hundred trillion atoms, if the spine
has thirty-three vertebrae—
                   if each atom
has a shadow—then the lilacs across the yard
are nebulae beginning to star.
If the fruit flies that settle on the orange
on the table rise
like the photons
                     from a bomb fire miles away,
my thoughts at the moment of explosion
are nails suspended
in a jar of honey.
                              I peel the orange
for you, spread the honey on your toast.
When our skin touches
our atoms touch, their shadows
merging into a shadow galaxy.
And if echoes are shadows
of sounds, if each hexagonal cell in the body
is a dark pool of jelly,
if within each cell
drones another cell—
                        The moment the bomb explodes
the man’s spine bends like its shadow
across the road.
The moment he loses his hearing
I think you are calling me
from across the house
because my ears start to ring.
From the kitchen window
                     I see the lilacs crackling like static
as if erasing, teleporting,
thousands of bees rising from the blossoms:
tiny flames in the sun.
I lick the knife   
and the honey pierces my tongue:
                       a nail made of light.
My body is wrapped in honey. When I step outside
                                  I become fire.

Vapor

When it happens the rain
is not black but powder.

A noise bleeds from your ears
and everything quakes

alive inside you:
the circuits of the flowers

lighting up across a meadow,
the nanoglow

of a sea years from here
           —:And like the flash

across an event horizon,
your thought disappears

:—and then the mind
threshed, and then the brain

a perfume of proto-pollen:
a microscopic cloud

radiating in a geranium
in the meadow of another country:

a powder the elk eat
in the sudden black rain.
 

Related Poems

Fort Night

The snake is 
a sleeve the deer 

puts on, its mouth 
a beaded cuff 

in the haze men 
make of morning 

with each release 
of their fist-gripped 

guns. Is this a dream 
of shame? Is this 

a dream of potential
unmet, of possibility 

undone? School, 
no pants. Brush, 

no teeth. Podium, 
no poems. Open

door, all wall. 
Dear Monster,

none of the guests 
we disinvited arrive. 

In the darkness 
no lion comes.

The Body Is the Victory and the Defeat of Dreams

The body is the Victory of dreams
when shameless as water
it rises from slumber
its pock marks, its scars
such signs still asleep
its dark olive groves
in love,
cool to the hand.

The body is the Defeat of dreams
spread out long and empty
(if you shout, you hear the echo)
with its anemic tiny hairs
unloved by time
wounded, sobbing
hating its own motion
its original black color
fades steadily
when it wakes it clasps its bag
hanging on to pain for hours
in the dust.

The body is the Victory of dreams
when it puts one foot in front of the other
and gains a certain ground.
A place.
With a heavy thump.
Death.
When the body gains a place
in a town square
after death
like a wolf with a burning snout
it howls, "I want it"
"I can't stand it"
"I threaten—I revolt"
"My baby is hungry."

The body gives birth to justice
and its defense.
The body creates the flower
spits out the death-pit
tumbles over, takes flight
spins motionless around the cesspool
(the world's motion)
in dreams the body triumphs
of finds itself naked in the streets
in pain;
it loses its teeth
shivers from love
breaks its earth open
like a watermelon
and is done.

Joke

In what I think is a dream,
I look at some manifestation of the past

& say, I know you’re not real. Someone has to.
As most dream-things do, the past

shapeshifts, reconstitutes itself with new
eyes & a new haircut—the past

made over—& then I forget its name.
I forget what I’m doing with the past.

What is that joke about the river?
It’s not really a joke, no more than the past

is really past—the one about water never
being the same water. As it flows past,

the river’s current—now that’s a joke—
is always flowing now, now, now. Past

seven, when I wake from what I think
is a dream—a dream where I tell the past

the truth about itself—it is the present
as it always is. There is no past.