USA

GEWANTED@gunet.georgetown.edu 

Conduct of Our Loves

There's a kind of sky below the ocean-
a field of starfish, turning slowly
like cogs inside
a water-watch, wound by a sea river;
the star's five fingers tremble and
reach for a clam's book of meat,
into which it will inject a sedative
and then its stomach.

In The City, escaped parrots colonize
a hilltop and breed, cackling You want that
in a bag? More hits after this…

-And how should we conduct our loves?  Black & white
judgments still beget grays, like baptisms
of the photograph:
developer is Need, stop-bath Guilt, the fixer
Memory.  Then we classify the causes,
studying the elephants' "Green Penis Disease"
till we learn it is Must.  The philosopher clarifies
his mind like butter;

life dumps in raw clams, and it de-natures.
So do we love who conducts our love?
The zookeeper who earned the elephants' respect

was nicknamed "God" by the others; when Nietzsche
cracked and bellowed, his mother stuffed his mouth
with apple-bits,
and he "growled dully to himself."  Emptiness
propels, beauty reels-we skip in the currents….
If the Angler-fish can find a female
he attaches his jaws to her genitals:
their blood-systems unite,

his heart withers, and he degenerates into
a pulsing bag of sperm, fertilizing her
unto death.  Still she swims through the vaults

of black waters, her angler glowing
from its forehead stalk of flesh: a Diogenes
barrelled by her mate
and her young, prowling in God's hunger;
as the Flounder ages he flattens, and one eye
migrates toward the other, ontogeny
posing as Modern Art, just as his name
poses him as indecisive-

nature dooms that he look up to his enemies, rained
with light; but another one, swimming, can't look down,
a waffling shadow he knows, and he calls her God.

Letter In My Desk

Dear David,
Not writing back seems a conscious act-
Maybe you've been too busy, whatever;
or you got suspicious

after my last letter
and talked to my folks.  I worry about that,
and then I worry about worrying.
I'm sorry I lied

in the letter.
This "campus" is a psychiatric institution
-it's as ugly as that sounds.
I'm sorry.

When you wrote,
I knew our boyhood interest in Creativity
continued.  I feel like we're moving in some
sort of parallel

to each other
but didn't realize, like a dream
I had where a man was following me
in front.

My doctor says
I'm an exceptionally complex person.
Rereading this, I know it's all jumbled-
They give me

psychotropic drugs
to block "attacks," then others to block
the side effects.  By the evenings
I can hardly walk.

Some people here,
they just lift them up and down with drugs,
like puppets.  They say I won't be able
to do math anymore-

cure or side effect?
What exactly am I being saved for.
I know an ex-patient who's going
to sue these doctors

for what they've done.
I'm writing you early before the drugs hit.
I can explain how this has happened-
but not why.

Remember Mrs. Claxton
who had the hate-vein in her forehead?
(That's when we secretly wore weight-vests
under our sweaters

and squeezed balls
to build ourselves up.)  She'd tell us
"Complete your sentences" and we'd joke
about prison terms.

Well, reading a lot
in college sometimes, a phrase or sign
gave other meanings, coded messages to me.
Someone would say

"I'm a twin"
and I'd realize everything that meant…Or
seeing your name sliced up in a birthday cake.
Or the sign

WATCH REPAIRS.
It's stupid I know-but in a way,
it's an order.  Or this sequence in the
Penguin Dictionary:

kourbash - Egyptian whip
kowtow - bow down in China
kraal - fenced in, S. Africa
krait - venomous Indian snake
kraken - sea-monster, North Sea
Kremlin - …!!

I made connections,
under-systems they wouldn't show us in school.
Learning a career was just learning to adjust
a machine that's

grinding us up.
I got more involved in these researches-
I let school go-  There's a grammar
motivating things

we have to say.
My Doctor tells me these are all "symptoms"
of other problems; but this fits my theory
of interior structures

like a true statue
whose organs are carved inside the torso.
Then I had a "crisis"-actually, I was showing
how erased writings

"left" on a blackboard
were interpolated in a Professor's lecture:
A simple prolepsis.  Now they tell me
it will take a while

before I can leave
or go to school part time.  I can't explain
my discoveries to my parents-
you know my mom-

she cries a lot,
so I can't talk to them.  I must
publish these finding, but with the drugs
I can't work long;

they net me in.
Can you help m in this.  You know why.
All these years, I've been banging
on a door-

but I'm the door;
remember that Ellison phrase "Perhaps in
lower frequencies I speak for you."
Maybe I make you

afraid of me-
But even this typewriter holds the inner grid.
Three consecutive keys that form questions
About you and me.

Y U? I?
        Your friend,

-S.

In the Belly

Dad pays him to teach me the boy thought
as the old man watched from behind jib- 
The cool burnt cherry from his pipe

sweetened the ocean smell, its spoilage
and cure of brine.  On tack or coming about,
the man was practical, oracular:

Weight the gunwale on close hauls.  Don't luff.
He read out the lesson while the boy
turned the pages of the sail.  One day

a leeward chill brought the man's eyes
down to his lap: Jesus.  Son, sit athwart.
He took the sheet, and the boom swung

like a dowser to the wind.  He's older
than Grandpa; he'll die soon the boy thought,
watching the piss eddy near his feet.

On pier the old man stumped off.  The boy
wandered around, he found a giant kettle
"From the last whaling ship, 1860"

looming like a monster's egg.  The charred
candlefat iron stung his eyes.  He'd read about
boiling blubber, "A reeking soup of flesh..."

But this, the stink left in the belly
of the pot, this was new: it was not
of the sea, not of the old man's piss- 

Leaning in, he squinted at genitals and names,
at what a century of boys had dared
to scrawl along its passive flank.

Frisson: Richard II Forty

Kind, almost courtly, a    "good listener," he kept lovers
away, fearing and feeling    that long contact would reveal

some horrid prospect of his interior    -childish impulse, this
dread of being stripped bare,    shown to be a freak.  Though

he grew past the need    to worry, for his soul had stilled like
seawater left in a tank,    he held his dread like a keepsake

and grew more caring of it    than of the woman who pressed
against his arm at work,    breathing quietly…so that finally,

when he met a dark-eyed    misanthrope, whose severe
answers to men masked    her own fear of exposure, of

letting her nature mix with    theirs, he took her to have
discovered his hidden self,    like a gleaner in a field of glass gems

who, knowing the small   profit in some glittering cast-off,
still pockets it for another    day: what a frisson, he told

himself, to be seen at last,    seen through, to be found wanting
and still wanted.  He took    her sourness for sympathy, criticism

for care.  And she,    sensing that withheld affection somehow
contented him, knew    he'd never press her to the wall: 

whether a man thinks    too much of himself, or too little, 
the woman is left alone.    How well their love was paid 

for what it gave away,    a damp valley now blackening
beyond the smudge-lamps    of their terrace.  Flanked

on the love seat,    they hug a family of strategems
while the lost coin    of the sun rolls over

the stronghold of houses,    over the reckless sea,
then gilds other houses    then rolls away….

Je reste roi de mes douleurs, Yet I remain king of my sorrows.

Divorce and Mr. Circe

When, my quiet scientific friend,
      fattening your rabbits for the blood-tap,

            the smirking pig trotting toward its noose,
did you first think of grafting a new life

to your life?  Because the body is hostile
      (you once explained) it must be tricked

            into welcoming the foreign substance
that can save it, the trickle of pig

you now slip inside a man's skull.  Call it
      immuno-suppression.  Or call it

            a violation of self, when the spores
leech through the soft Parkinsonian

ganglia, so the spastic man
      tied twenty years to a chair by

            his frantic wife, can now smack
a nine-iron and snort Watch her go….

To graft new life is to cut one away,
      to grow from withering-

            Whatever it is you put in a brain
has first come from yours:

What remains there today
      when dog will mew, and cat

            will have his day, when a man
quivering after years of

deliberation rises from his chair at last,
      closes with steady hand the door

            his wife holds
and walks away from his house?

© All Copyright, 2000, David Gewanter.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.