Afterlife
after Brigit Pegeen Kelly
1.
There is a stag in the apple tree,
head mounted on the middle bough.
The stag was shot by a child who
will take after his father. Daddy helped
him hold the gun. Show me the holy
hunter: the stag in the autumn brush
crying for sex. His song concupiscent,
cerise of tongue. But the doe hears
only Death. She knows the thrum,
the drum of Danger, daughter of.
The stag by the brook and the earth,
darkens. Will she think of the dead stag
bleating for her body as she bows to
her groom in a glade of grasses, womb
throbbing on the late spring asters as
she licks the afterbirth from her babe.
2.
Listen: I have come to know the dead
come back through the arbor, make an
afterlife in the trees. Once, I watered
the apple tree with my menstrual blood.
Feared for years — I had killed it. But
the apple dons a flame that Death cannot
choke out: her fruit rosid as cherry
cover the walk in her saccharine cider
of decay. The aroma of autumn
sensuous, charred, feasting. Long past
her thirtieth year, the apple hangs on.
Respectively, such an age is one third of
a third — of a breath. And now, the
head of a stag stares from the limb, his
ash blond coat struck by the carnation
hours of dawn. On summer nights, the
auburn leaves and globose pomes of
the apple blaze, feigning death. And I
hear the apple calling to the orchard,
the stag singing his body to the tree.
THE HANGED MAN ON THE HAWTHORN TREE
Bathing at night, the hanged man watched me through a crack in the wall.
Hunted me and touched himself. Just as the hoary bat feasts nocturnally
and tongues the plum of their lover’s vulva. Nothing is more judicious
than cunnilingus — after yes. Only this was not that. Marooned by the
dark, a voice sang who’s there, stammering. She was no nightingale. Answering,
the sound of Someone darting through brush, splintering. In the outhouse,
the water poured cold down my back, black cold as the roots of the
cottonwood dig in the river. Pith of midsummer, even flame can shiver.
After, I could not sleep alone: a couplet of women curled on the floor
by my bed. Coddled me like a puritan girl on the cloth of an old fever
and cough. As if being stalked can carve a child out of a woman. But I
was no child. None of us could sleep. Leaving, they wrote me a letter
that said we will miss you. Which was to say, we hope he won’t come back.
I have no such faith, I have no faith in men. When he came back, he came
dressed in the body of another man, shook off the rag of his skin in the
bush, singed with a shame that cannot burn out. Under the malignity
of moonlight, dead men make young men tread. By the thorn I swore,
scarlet in my heart: I sang to Death and Death sang the world to me.
SONG OF SANCTUARY
Across the road, there is a cemetery. Listen: the bats are singing
their song of night, their song of sanctuary. Sound rises
from a thicket in the brush, rises with the chorus of southern
stars and the stories they tell. What secrets burn to speak
in the dark? With the dead, there is life. The bats are feasting
on the night’s ripe fruit and females swell the clitoris
with blood. They are protected in the ashes, pleasured on the
slitted bark thick with ivy. Dangling from the branches,
they dream with Death — the man outside my window, hanging
from the tree. How many men will he possess? How long
will he walk, looking for light? Illuminated by flame, I was unlike
him. And he was watching me. My mother, holding me,
but only in spirit. There is more to me than spirit. Beyond the
grounds, the bats are hunted in the broad of afternoon.
Children climb into the canopies and catch them while they sleep,
haul them home to their mothers, lame in the palm. Hunger,
like Love, is a deathless animal of the heart. Like Lust, she thirsts,
and in the dark, she sings. Can you hear her burning?
ADEAMUS
I was visited by five ghosts. No — it was one man.
On my twenty fifth year, I was far from home.
And the soul gasped — raw as liver, ravished and
unclothed. Fear can possess a heart, poisonously
as supernatural fruit. Will you hear me? First, he
watched me shower after the animals had gone
to sleep, the dark of an eye upon me. Was he a she,
like the soul, curious as I once was of the body
that would become my own? Second, he watched
me bathe and gave himself a beating, then hid
in the mountains until admitting what he did. Said
he was sorry. But he was not sorry. His hand —
slick on my hand. Third, he watched me change for
dinner from the head of a three-headed boy —
peeping under the tapestries. The smallest head was
blamed. He could not look at me. Forth, a voice
whispered my name, stalked me from the brush after
the sun went down — a boy my age high in the
weeds. By then, it was autumn and I finally bled —
women gowned around me with flowers and
flame as we talked about the pussy in the thistling
pastures. My wound unhaunted where I was
bitten. Fifth, the hanged man came onto me, his
shadow in the corner of my room. I have seen the
worst of man. From the tree, he cut his body down.
IN A PAST LIFE
for Alexander
1.
South of a Scandinavian shoal, my brother
braids through the fields in his robes — braids
through the wheat and the oats, tending.
A late spring brushes through a shepherd’s grain,
brushes like the boar bristle brush
through the blond of his daughter’s hair —
blond as his own. Home with his haul,
he lifts his daughter onto his hip & holds her
by the hearth, helps her pour the honey in —
clove and cardamom crushed with their hands.
In the dark of a corner cabinet and covered
with cloth, the mead they made will bloom with
age — sung and stored in barrels out back,
buried by the parsnips sooted with snow.
2.
My brother, tucking me into bed at night,
asked me what I could see. First, cholera spelled out
on the spirit board, but only amusingly.
He had me spooked like a filly horse for a while.
I wanted to believe in the supernatural,
stories that sent me crawling into my mother’s bed.
Centuries after & strolling under big leaf
magnolias, my brother asks, if perhaps — there might
be something here? A shepherd lifts a cattle horn
cup to my lips, once an offering to a medieval grave.
Before there was cicerone, there was this:
the half note hymn of a past life, a botanical lesson
on the hillocks as sheep scurry with their herd,
the fume of burnt sugar in a sheepdog’s coat
after a day under lightning. My brother, what I see
is your heart bound to earth with my own,
a daughter with our mother’s hair — dreaming
with the glume of her father beating under
her ear. And I can hear the shepherd calling you to me.
THE AMBER ROOM
Walking through the field, I came upon two coyotes.
Their heads inside a snow mound, feasting.
The mink was killed affectionately, as if eating the afterbirth
from their pups. I felt coddled by their maternal
nod toward my figure, wintered like a canoness on the plain.
I watched them carry the mink by his neck,
auburned from the teeth, to their secret place, their amber
room. I envisioned them coiled in the heat
of their conclave with the immaculate garnet flesh they found.
How long will their thirst be staved before
starving? All that remained was a stain of blood, a cursive
stream of scarlet on the white sheet of the
field, and the thread — feverish and throbbing from me to
them, shredding at the stitch. Before I came
to Colorado, I sensed the coyotes with their cinereous coats
as if they summoned me, as if I conjured
them. To my sorrow, they were macerated as the mountains
stripped by settlers curing meat. Among their
kin, who turns, burning on the spit? Dreaming, they dream
of them, going up with the bush. They reminded
me of sisters, banished from the world they knew. In
another life, were they accused of sorcery, hair of
flame let down in the field. They were the light that
grew in the gale. The pastor with his sola scriptura,
swelling with superstition under his robes. He is the
hunter that cannot be redeemed. Every year, the
coyotes wait for the sisters to return to the field. They
watch them set fire to the wheat¹. Match against the
book, autumn ablaze with anguish and gone by dusk.
_________________________________
¹ The final three lines allude to part 3 of Louise Glück’s “Landscape”
A LETTER FROM ANOTHER AGE
after Lucie Brock-Broido
Hope, alas, is headed east —
but will I see the man
who raped me on the late marsh grasses —
the water lilies & the needlerush
were at once, ablaze.
See me in the flowers burning
as the pilgrims gathered,
wooden bells damping
on their garbs, see me in smoke
from the mallow roses,
wooly waving cloth in their hands.
I was enamored —
with an Andalusian, carried my torch
for the myth of horses
made darkly — out of man.
If I had conjured him
an innocent, what of me, then?
And what of him —
bosom of stone, bosom of armor,
who I saw become Another?
Was it he who said,
if I was harmed, then he would kill,
or was it — devil in him
that is bedeviled in me?
I need not trade my soul
to possess the buttressed root
that knocks him — cold,
harm wrung from the rag of him.
A man walks the streets
of Massachusetts — and dangerously.
Trousers, I suspect, agrarian
and still on fire — in the lie.
Is it you, perhaps, or is it you? Brunette
in a bramble of brown and
the briar in the hem of his sleeve.
What will come from beneath
me, then? Animalia, flame who shivers.
What can become — of a man
in ruin? Angel, come, and hold your hand
to my primordial heart. Hear me:
silence is more deadly than the devil
and my most haunting song.
