| Sam Witt |
| USA
RHAPSODY IN CRISPER GREEN To hunger in the bleached light of the refrigerator, ammonia-splash, what roots are disappearing, I can hear a wind whistling in your molar, Uncle Bitch, Honeycow, Harness: to breathe, to fledge, to bird, by oneself or in company. With my face like a fingerprint in gunpowder—a hair, longing down from the immaculate sky, sun-strand— I’m caught singing sackcloth and ash, sackcloth and ash; you are the sun’s brief linen, undergarmented in the kitchen, discarded on the parquet. Caught singing Uncle, colorful sleeve of a fisherman’s sweater, devoured like tongue in the crisper’s pregnance, the colors, collapsing in my hand. To go out like the sun, with a laugh. To chuckle a downpour like the ice-maker. I am spending my eyelids numerously in this harmless rain, lips on a cigarette, spending these notes in your earless ear. I can smell your thirst taking me apart nerve-wise, Uncle, even your slightest gesture carries the scent of a summer rain. . . I fledge myself to thee, sang the worm, Uncle We, milk of furtive days, Uncle Years, and years of it, steady drip of the faucet eating away the morning (hang on;) to pig, to bristle like a hairbrush, to root; it’s you, it’s me, wrist me beyond the shadow of a shadow, to cipher the fingerprints of the lost, their breathing the constant mumble of coolant; mine, O seeker of lost hordes, where is the real person in all of this. (No, only the dust in the corner is 80% skin. It’s dry, like desert soup; Uncle, it’s tough trying to breathe for the world in these silent ditches, Uncle, in the trees.) I have slept so long in the sun, my brain has roasted through, an eggplant, splitting at the seams, needless as traffic and sizzling, (hang on. . .) No, it’s only the refrigerator belt, starting up its steady song to the leftovers, feeding off my breasts. Dear Auntie Me, I am hungry for pain this morning, my glaucous sins, brutal and glutinous as the sky. O preserve me in Uncle Salt, Uncle Sated, make love to my blue, blue eyes, to the gunmetal blue, wherefore it hurts to stare. Don’t make tea from my eyelids. To have a child, to have not a child, childless behind the quicktrip by the dumpster, the gulls widowing a circle in the sky, riffing off our heat, about to snap us into sleep, to rip myself open and let some blue squeak in, some sky, to survive. Don’t exhaust my fingerprints on all the ice-cubes. Don’t dissect my throat. If I want to lie here in the personal dark and touch myself, what’s it to you, smiling so happily in the dawn’s shredded light? (And you dare call yourself yesterday?) (And you dare call yourself green?) Not the ice-cream, not the broccoli, not your pickled eggs. Not last week’s Shepherd’s Pie. Not the person behind me, who laughs in a whisper, and fadesCredit: First published in Fishdrum Magazine. LATE SNOW FALLING 1. I don’t care that happiness falls this way,
gone tomorrow,
half a life most
trippingly. . . O me, slipcase and the slick
branches with their tuning-fork hum: (Half my life has passed, once defibrillated, half a lungful and rising, I don’t care
that we decompose call me
Featherhead, and falling— 2
Like
a catfish I move again, 3. The river being bodiless beneath its scarred ice (last night I dreamt a slaughtered pony in the river—) lord, the river
bleeds through its cracked skin like my breathing. turned in the
leafrot, and shouldering Dipped my wrist
in the water. Felt your icy pull. I
am dusting your branches and my heat, and hum, a chip
of snow a handful of
empty syllables calf, hip. . . FROM A BOOK OF THE DEAD CHAP. IV. Containing as Much of the Birth of the Foundling as can be gathered out of the rubbish of antiquity, which hath been carefully sifted for that purpose, with other suitable decorations of death, such as tempest, shipwreck & earthquake; in which, however, is a sun, a moon, a star & an angel. So that the passage of air might breathe with me, once, long ago, if memory serves, his eyes are staring, his mouth open, his wings are spread—- Poisoned rain that swept his cheeks, Today was not Yesterday. Speak to me as if he were the past, blown backwards Facing fixedly this disturbance. For he is dead in his own lifetime, A gentle breeze through the litter, corrosives of sunlight dissolving his eyelids;
It has got caught in his wings with such violence that he can no longer close them, some fetid, corporeal skin of dissolved fibre & soft light at the moment of his birth, the entrails of what was left. Dust of asbestos from his dissipating wings. The dust of many crumbled cities in a forgetful haze. I watched his infected skin falling —When the sunlight lays down its pale, pale skin to the floor, a few yellowed pages from the Industrial Age,
A sweet disfigurement—with similarly small hands. . . It is a simple night that soft footsteps are born. When I face myself in the buckled window panes—Paper Mills, Blind Smokestacks, Buried Rivers that murmured the lower voltages, When my government ships its waste to poorer countries at night, Bracelets of underworlded blood, the City of Death & all that, it is a Shining City, my America, Piling wreckage upon wreckage & hurls it at his small feet; in the breezeways, in the alleys, the debris grows skyward
Into which cracks of being he falls. & suddenly his emptiness no longer ceases to happen where my fingers are not but a storm is blowing from Paradise, Blowing him backwards into a crumpled, human form. CHAP. VII. Concerning Apparitions. That they are not so frequent in places where the Gospel prevaileth, as in the dark corners of the Earth. That good Angels do sometimes visibly appear. Confirmed by several Histories, together with a Faithful NARRATIVE of the many Dangers and Sufferings, as well as wonderful Deliverances during his late Captivity among the INDIANS. Concerning the appearance of persons deceased. The procuring cause thereof is usually some sin committed. Of Mens covenanting to appear after their death. It is an heavy Judgement when places are infested with such doleful Spectres.
Once, long ago, I made a neat incision just below the wrist where I tucked my child away, as orphanhood belongs to the poor, it healed into a bloodless pocket of skin, a thin, aluminum quill No, it was a lockpick I kept there, for often I was called upon to escape. & as we marched, they frequently every Day gave the Dead Shout which was repeated as many Times as there were Captives, his wife big with Child & delivered on the Road to Canada, which fhe called Captive; Sun, Moon, Turmoil: Bitter & Sweet waters Under the Earth: River that has no water Lie down to sleep in the heavens with my prayer— Trees that were stars planted in the sky:
Asphodel meadow beneath the Earth: Softly she walked to her son’s body —Though the grass will shoot from the land, I am not shoots of grass— & has only this to say: ‘ You look different ’ Dressed in the hair of the deceased as I am, Waiting to be born! My Father & Mother, that I had never feen before, were waiting, & ordered me into a Houfe, to fit down filent. My Mother began to cry for fome time, then dried up her Tears, & received me for her son. I was a gift from the hospital, like Typhus. Consisting of coats, blankets, skins, cloth, powder, lead, shot, & to each a bag of paint for their own life I must have had that ‘ caught in the machinery ’ Way of crying, & put a belt of Wampum round my Neck, inftead of the Rope which I had worn 400 miles.
Where pain sings to excite its radiance in all things, a green, fluorescent longing that sighs through my bedsheets in the Birding Hour of violent dreams, When all things seem to hide in their cold forms, Soft thigh of my humming engrafted to the heater’s softness— Do you remember me? I’m the one who was born with both eyes open. Where the river takes its beginning I was delivered to three young Men, who faid I was their Brother, & commanded me to dance round the fire Bare-foot, & fing the Prisoner’s Song. But apprehending my compliance finful , I determined to perfift in declining it at all Adventures When I write, I write in a room wherein many have died—these are called the Shining Ones, who drift through me in a plume of lost hair—reaching out to the beginnings of each moment— Then a Place was foon erected to celebrate Mafs in, which being ended we all went over the Mouth of a River, & then faw the town, over a greater River, which was ftill frozen. O happy weight shimmering in its hurt now that we’re born. I was startled by an arc of color in the surface of that pond & it shadowed my face. Held up into that willowy space in daddy’s hands, a green flicker above the water, A rainbow reflected, cool watercress, what smelled like rubbing alcohol. It’s as if both eyes have been sewn open saying you fhall dance & fing Now that my eyes were bleeding green, little shoulder of color ripped forth from its arc, you are beautiful when alive! & all was surface. I waited till near dark, with no lingering motion, a very narrow & furprizing Efcape, from a violent Death, a paffage being provided for us; Through the back Part of the House, over fome high Pickets, & out of the City, to the River Side, where it empties itself into the East end of Lake Ontario & fled! The second rainbow arcing the first even more throbbingly wherein my tongue was asleep on the water—a dove’s flight scarred that side of my vision with its thermal signatures, not cried out but whispered— Till a better birth presented Ah sweetly famished mornings I rose Into the evening pollution, my hands so radiant I had to hide them! CHAP. II. I find the Print of a Man’s Naked Foot. That boy with a blue, hollow chest & blueish hair. I passed him one night in the breezeway as I died with the others. Wore my own skin swabbed in nakedness. Wore my expression blunt as a knee. I touched him there instead with similarly small hands, just a slip of a thing, I kissed him on his thin shoulder-blade I shall anoint. . . In his sleep he makes small sounds like the spooling of tiny electrical meters I could never decipher, hunched beside me on the bed. In a headdress of diesel fumes in heavy sunlight at dusk I shimmered & he swaddled me over from head to foot, bore my own skin to the savage air until I’m cold again. He says to me: “ You’re not naked enough ” Disrob in the saturated tearing of a breeze that lifted the palm branches. He says: “ You’re not naked ” Lifted my torn skin where the soft light had entered me . . . Disease With a kind, gentle, oval face, forgive me for believing in my own death & we laughed in one long pull on the bed. Releases a flaming sparrow into my bedroom to break the air, he lifts a glass to my lips, the dust on the water alive with thin blue flames, to break my fever, I held the charred, dead sparrow in my hands, lying in the middle of the floor in my sleep, I shall ignite you. . . Waiting for laughter to excite my sleep, laughter which died a long time ago in the brooding taste of a cry trembled through my soft temples. At some point in those heavy, innocent afternoons, my voice appeared to me as a high-hung, inhuman, radar effect—radiant symptom buried in a sweet headache of light, scratch of a pencil on paper of squirrel’s feet on the tin roof, so that I could listen to it, as if my ear were a long, tunneled space. & in the small hours when I returned to his poor shoulder he was gone; pigeons, or squirrels, I don’t know which, in the dark spaces above my head, were nesting in pink fibre-glass insulation, the high-pitched squealing of many pulleys— E R R A T A Containing the insides of a Prison
After a while I began to notice lines from my own poetry on the walls.
Of a Deaf Man in Hull there’s more than life to this Under whose Tongue a Stone bred In faint, blue pencil in the corners of rooms I did not know, after waking into the white-wash. Poisonous colors a scent of peach leaves filled the rooms not all of fear is veiled desire, The faintest, bluest writing! I could never decipher those words: Later in that room, the darkness sent down a demonchild in the form of a small, damp breeze against my neck, sent down to whisper my name— Phosphorescent shapes never seen below, Spindrift of wet wind & spume Sweet, sleeping sickness, You: Father, I said, I must turn my drowned pen & shaking hand, we are born into a series of disasters Happening long ago Did I enter the sun when I slept? ‘No; the tendernefs of a Father’s Bowels— ’ This joyful Sight that He wept! Cyanogen fires, aniline ridges, faces, sheets of hair. Did I live in this perfectly preserved past, canned foods from the forties on the shelves? There was a man that if he did hear the sound of a Bell, he would immediately die away— ( & wrote these still, innocent moments through my own skin
Special Answers of Prayer made in that place That People marvelously preserved ) Which yesterday made my voices so colossal & small, —My hair swept back by a great wind & the original calamity that caused it, I turn back to the wreckage— I leaned, pausing there, each voice was slow & fast— ( & slept the sleep that erases all thought. ) F I N I S .
© All Copyright, Sam Witt. |
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