after bernadette mayer’s “essay”

the good guys

This is a poem for two people succumbing to language. Maybe only I succumb. Stubborn Alana, eyes in the mud, reduced to the howling mammal that she is. Ask her; why don’t you beg? I beg. Are you a stump, whinnying for limbs, striving for form, fed glucose far past your death? I paw at the ground. Are you a root hung flaglike above your earth, flash-frozen on the wind, a pulley system, you at one end of the thread, the other end empty? Yes, I feel exposed like a child at dawn. No, I have never been afraid of heights. Mark me for it, then, what I am, in white: an orb, squeezed into girl-shape, and set aflame. I neglect you. You, the sum of all my wanting, a knife I turn over and over in my hands; we sit in the water, and you are easy for a while.  Everything you wanted, unbraided every time.

sister mother grandmother

after James Dickey’s “The Sheep Child” This train splits me into Soft faun and         grass-dark boy On dark-grass hill          fingers steepled Then undone.         Dion Vale, you are finished At last, separating at the middle like child from Foamy umbilical cord. They will Say         I saw all of it When he split in two Like separating the moon From the cupped hands of the sky His skin         fell to white And soft as         corpse-flesh His feet         black leather cornucopias We scattered to the brush.         I will never leave here Blazing light fills my belly         I die as deep as I was born Into the wild grass, under my mother’s heaving belly. As she keens toward the milky west, All these wet leagues of her lurch. She laps The slime from my lambhead and shies from my Deadwater face. Huffing and moaning my bloodied name, She lowers herself to my mouth, but I have cleaved it To my thumb. I eat of nothing. I sleep. My mother thinks to smother me In her vast whiteness but almost knows My half-brothers want me for themselves. They say, we will break him like         halving a yoke, We will leave him under         an ungiving moon We will         leave him fossilized and cold- In their dreams I slither bellydown through the grass Toward them         numbly they run         swooning downhill They run         I am all white eyes and slaughter-noise I find my hocks and once again I become All the things born glistening and still In the woods behind their houses         I say My rebirth will be a glory         I plunge toward these boys They scatter         I pick them off with my cloven hooves Until then I bide my time         until then I am the Roll of the land the scrape of the train against the tracks Until then I unhinge my jaw and swallow the sun every night While my brothers suffer the extinction of Dion Vale And come to know their own.    

ohgd :~)

all water flowing south