Die gerettete Zunge

by Richard Siken

1

A man saw a bird and found him beautiful. The bird had a song inside him, and feathers. Sometimes the man felt like the bird and sometimes the man felt like a stone—solid, inevitable—but mostly he felt like a bird, or that there was a bird inside him, or that something inside him was like a bird fluttering. This went on for a long time.

2

A man saw a bird and wanted to paint it. The problem, if there was one, was simply a problem with the question. Why paint a bird? Why do anything at all? Not how, because hows are easy—series or sequence, one foot after the other—but existentially why bother, what does it solve?

And just because you want to paint a bird, do actually paint a bird, it doesn’t mean you’ve accomplished anything. Who gets to measure the distance between experience and its representation? Who controls the lines of inquiry? We do. Anyone can.

Blackbird, he says. So be it, indexed and normative. But it isn’t a bird, it’s a man in a bird suit, blue shoulders instead of feathers, because he isn’t looking at a bird, real bird, as he paints, he is looking at his heart, which is impossible.

Unless his heart is a metaphor for his heart, as everything is a metaphor for itself, so that looking at the paint is like looking at a bird that isn’t there, with a song in its throat that you don’t want to hear but you paint anyway.

The hand is a voice that can sing what the voice will not, and the hand wants to do something useful. Sometimes, at night, in bed, before I fall asleep, I think about a poem I might write, someday, about my heart, says the heart.

3

They looked at the animals. They looked at the walls of the cave. This is earlier, these are different men. They painted in torchlight: red mostly, sometimes black—mammoth, lion, horse, bear—things on a wall, in profile or superimposed, dynamic and alert.

They weren’t animals but they looked like animals, enough like animals to make it confusing, meant something but the meaning was slippery: it wasn’t there but it remained, looked like the thing but wasn’t the thing—was a second thing, following a second set of rules—and it was too late: their power over it was no longer absolute.

What is alive and what isn’t and what should we do about it? Theories: about the nature of the thing. And of the soul. Because people die. The fear: that nothing survives. The greater fear: that something does.

The night sky is vast and wide.

They huddled closer, shoulder to shoulder, painted themselves in herds, all together and apart from the rest. They looked at the sky, and at the mud, and at their hands in the mud, and their dead friends in the mud. This went on for a long time.

4

To be a bird, or a flock of birds doing something together, one or many, starling or murmuration. To be a man on a hill, or all the men on all the hills, or half a man shivering in the flock of himself. These are some choices.

The night sky is vast and wide.

A man had two birds in his head—not in his throat, not in his chest—and the birds would sing all day never stopping. The man thought to himself, One of these birds is not my bird. The birds agreed.  

by Franz Wright

Anne Carson 

It was a November night of wind. Leaves tore past the window. God had the book of life open at PLEASURE and was holding the pages down in one hand because of the wind from the door. For I made their flesh as a sieve wrote God at the top of the page and then listed in order:

Happy New Year!

by Thomas James 

 I

In April we will pierce his body.

It is March. Snow is dust over the branches.

A pony hunches in the orchard.

I stand at the frozen mouth of the river,

Thinking of you.

In the house where you live

Frost glitters on the windows

Like uncounted pieces of silver.

Already they are preparing the wine and the bread.

   II

The field is banked with purple asters

And a spill of mustard flowers.

The earth has taken on terrible proportions.

Out in an unused meadow

The wildflowers have already covered

The delicate bones of an Indian.

Bees are flying across the meadow

To a hive under the rafters of the barn.

Someone is leading a horse with crippled bones

Into the spikes of clover.

   III

Alexander died this morning,

Leaving his worldly possessions

To the strongest.

I watched an empire fade across his lips.

They propped him in the sun a while,

And then three women came to scour his body

Like a continent.

I am afraid of what the world will do.

Only this afternoon

I heard two worms conversing

In the shadow of his breastbone.

I slipped out of the palace

And entered a vein of gillyflowers

On the edge of potter’s field.

I will not be missed.

No one even noticed.

   IV

I have been thinking of the son

I would like to have.

The leaves have all gone yellow

Overnight, wrinkling like hands

In the updraught.

I drove my car by the creek

Because I had nowhere else to go.

The milkweed’s delicate closet had been fractured,

Filling the air with rumors.

Despite all I could do, the sumac

Had taken on the color of a mouth.

Tonight, I perceive the young girls

In my mother’s blood

Letting their seed pass by unnoticed,

A red nativity.

   V

Last night they dragged the canal

For an old man’s body.

Now he is singing for a hook

Just below water level.

A branch of ice is splitting open

Across each window,

And snow is dismantling the weeds

Like the breakable furniture of a boudoir.

I have been rereading your letters.

It is too cold for a virgin birth to occur

Even in the frosty suburbs

Of a wildflower.

   VI

I have learned to camouflage myself in church,

Masking my body

With the body of a saint.

Last night frost glazed the face of Mary Magdalene,

And snow rode up to the altar windows.

Before morning, the sparrows came down

To the body of Saint Francis.

Now he is upholstered in oak leaves

Like a living room chair.

This morning we are preparing a crucifixion.

I am thinking of you now.

With the velvet at my knees

And the silverware shining on the altar

And the stained glass moving out of focus

And the cross veiled in black,

I am present for the news of an enormous death.

I take the bread on my tongue

Like one of Christ’s fingers,

And the wine rides through my breast

Like a dark hearse.

All the while I am thinking of you.

An avalanche of white carnations

Is drifting across your voice

As it drifts across the voices of confession.

But the snow keeps whispering of you over and over.