Wheel With a Single Spoke (12 page)

assorted bodies thrown here and there

until their livers fell out, in fear.

Through the cold hallways where the ex-dead

become door handles instead

or they complete with their ex-meat

the walls that rust with swords and knives,

the guide lost his mind and ventriloquized

a string of fire from his mouth to ignite

my sense of hearing, sense of sight,

with my horse's muzzle I feed on hay,

with my stork's beak I fricassee

the interior, unseen cross.

I peck myself with squawking

hens and calm back down again –

when I traverse the stomach of the guide

like through the sack of great divide.

But the Å pilberk dead are not our twins,

they are too old for our cognition.

The newly dead, the newly dead

run over us like sweat,

the guide perceives my sweat-soaked

meninges and licks them.

I leave white. What's dry inside me growls.

A stone jester at the gate of the prison.

I lean against it. It is and isn't.

I kiss its cheek. I drink water from its mouth.

Sickly spheres appear, bubbly, livid,

pushing against the night, shoving it aside.

Spools of trees turn wet, turn to liquid

and flow, so bitter, to the other side.

Let's sit on benches in the damp

and watch the Prodigal Son return,

I know him by his sound and shape

and the way the nocturnal birds

fall dead above him

and by the cold of amphibians

that snake around my heels,

my ankles, my tibias . . .

Everything you saw froze so quickly

the lake and all that leapt

from its banks, and the comet

froze like a skier mid-jump.

Then it melted so quickly,

it would have been natural

for you to drown in the depths

like fish on gravel.

You just had to know to swim

and then to skate on the ice,

then swim, then skate,

for a moment – a day, a month – a life.

Because I imagine it

he told me:

law means having two hands

two hands with five fingers

each,

law means having two

feet

with five toes each

I sit among green branches

and imagine this

law, law means having

two hands

with five fingers each

law means having two

feet

with five toes each

Law means having a skull

with two eyes, two ears

two nostrils

two eyebrows, two

pairs of separations

He told me, because

I imagine

you have a head, two hands, two feet

Night falls and shadow falls

You lie down, but you won't for long

you have to be because you were

He told me: get up

walk around.

Come you, soul's grandeur

released from memory and the flight of guardian angels

always whooshing over you with wings

of calm, as though the world

were made of stained silk, and maternal hands

ripped it, slowly, out of spite.

Come grandeur and say:

I was just like him,

my nerves experienced the same vernal green,

I wrapped myself in the same horizon;

the plain of aloneness.

Everyone thought I was him, even me,

because of the sole sky

where the sun and moon beat

over us.

I went ahead of him, I went

behind,

I floated over him, or I was the road

and let his footsteps kiss me, over and over,

until everyone thought I was him,

even I thought I was him

because of the gift of death, something that

endowed us both.

When they stuck their split tongues out to whistle

words with seven heads,

biting and poisoning us, and we

had the same torn ear and the same bloodstains,

we colored diabolic syllables, –

I thought I was him, and everyone

thought I was him,

and only he knew

which body exactly he was in.

But only he really died,

only he knew that it was he,

but I did nothing but turn

my wrath a moment toward myself,

so law could pass in peace

and mystery could pass unmolested.

No earlier, no later.

The river flowed by quickly, even though

it was there alone, all the time.

Being there, it flowed

and carried being and everything, thus

we kissed with our throats cut.

My words and yours

stuck together, because

the place where they were born

was one and the same for both of us.

Like a god with two bodies and no head,

we trotted along

on four feet,

with four hands patting the walls.

The river flowed by quickly, even though

it existed alone.

Existing, it carried existence and all else.

Thus frozen and alone, we persisted

sleeping in the same knee joint,

in the center without color,

at the edge without noise.

Feelings go, oh,

in the ear

Feelings go, oh,

in the eye,

nostril, tongue.

Oh my, feelings go

in the ear.

They sleep like

an earring hangs,

they trip along the thin cartilage,

they bed on the drum of the tympanum . . .

. . . feelings go, oh,

in the ear.

Only the soul goes

nowhere.

The soul has nowhere to go.

The soul goes nowhere.

Its ear is

no one's ear.

As though it rained, long ago, the black earth,

slippery, bugs

with wet legs press their bodies

against black branches

or windows, or door frames, Lord,

oh,

and musty air on boxes

flecked with green.

God has left then, ah, he's left,

and there's no reason I can smell, no reason.

High hill, valley, high hill,

loam, black grass . . .

I break a lamb along its spine,

my thumb pops out its eye,

I snap a hoof off, then the nostrils,

the liver, the unguent kidney,

I hold the brain jelly in my palm

careful to not let it drip

its lamby vision, much too calm,

and stain my demiurgic tunic.

Lord, I burn them that the smell be sweet,

I will burn everything, for the sake of sin,

I will smite a bull between its horns

and cut the goat's jugular, to be forgiven,

I will tear apart any animal I meet.

To please you will I scorch

their pieces, and all of this to signify

that you and I resemble them. The torch

will burn whatever you want, the thigh

on the bone, the lung I pull into the light.

For you, O Lord, are the greatest sense of smell,

the nostril of time, the epochal nostril.

But I will never pluck a flower,

never crush a splendorous carnation,

nor will I ever have to pull the sex

from a sublime body of verdation.

We who have animal bodies

lacking roots, we move.

We, beside the flower's soft splendor,

sit eating one another.

So we may be a tasty feed

for worlds stuck in the earth,

the taxes trees and grass

will pay, simply to be.

We have only soles, but they

have roots in myth. Our sky

has stars alone, just stars,

while they are deep with halted time.

Toward all parts at once, said

the one without parts.

Toward one part alone, said

The Part.

What is it?

What what is it?

It is, pure and simple.

I mean I, I mean T, I mean I, I mean S.

The first I is older than the second I.

That's all.

Along the stone's grey-white edge

young people file by,

thin, like an evil chalk mark

on the idolatrous slate of the night.

O equations, to the power of two,

gentle trigonometry

of the only one who exists

in us, the divine “to be.”

They pass and bells ring,

they pass and cannons ring,

they pass and clocks ring,

ever faster, ever more disturbing.

Long and holy line, I would hang myself

from you alone, as if from a tree,

and let myself be rocked and rung

by a secular, cold breeze.

The power to be, but especially the power

to have been – being.

The power to not be

but especially the power

to have not been – being.

The power, ah, the power

to have not had power,

a-e-i-o-u, e-i-a-u-o,

u-a-i-e-o.

Sound with smell,

continuity without time,

migratory heart

exchanging bodies.

If you are no more, it is like

you have not been.

To be is like

you have not been,

a-e-i-o-u, u-o-i-e-a,

A and E

and I and O

and U . . .

A human is a leaf a human sees.

A human is a flower a human smells.

A human is a horse a human rides.

A human is a peach a human tastes.

A human is a sea a human touches.

A human is a wheel.

A human is milk a human drinks.

A human is the dawn over a human.

A human is a dream at night.

A human is the pleasure of a blue sky a human sees.

A human is a bird's flight a human flies.

A human is a word a human speaks.

A human is a word understood.

A human is a word a human reads.

A human is a word un-understood.

Human is a word asleep in human stone.

Human is a word at rest in stars

above the human.

Human is the unword of human.

Human is a dying human tended by a human.

Human takes a deposition