“I flung myself under a fig tree and gave free course to my tears.”

-Aristotle, Confessions

Garden walks are fraught with implications:
a kiss in Gethsemane’s shaded slopes
gave rise to wars and coronations,
zealots trading blades for priestly robes;
under Athens’ trellises, lads pressed
to catch the Master’s quips like drops of wine;
and Babylonian kings, in arbors dressed,
read battle scripts in every tangled vine.
Tonight we graft ourselves to them—we take
slow steps beneath the interlacing boughs—
each furtive touch a covenant we make,
bound by martyrs, kings, and Aristotle’s brow.
Let reason wait—desire will speak like this:
the breath before the dialectic and a kiss.

You’re predisposed to attracting the wild.
I’m not deceived by your far-off gaze
or the canted edges of your smile.
The gods confer—perhaps they are beguiled
enough to send the animals your way.
You’re predisposed to attracting the wild.
The geese and rabbits shadow you awhile
as we converse or kiss—they can’t but stray
to the canted edges of your smile.
With this, you resurrect the god of wine,
the moribund branch, the shriveled grape.
You’re predisposed to attracting the wild.
In Eros / Thanatos, you grant new life—
Prometheus flickers in your gaze
and the canted edges of your smile.
I can’t resist the revels—half a child,
half a beast—who needs the right to say:
You’re predisposed to attracting the wild
with the canted edges of your smile.

or: A Congress of Animals

The Japanese gave immanence to age,
a furtive magic in the oldest cat,
or so says Zack at the Meow Café—
headset mic askew. A special breed, to be exact,
of courtesan and kitten—a lineage spanning
Hello Kitty to yokai. He notes such prostitutes
were often found by customers covertly
choking down a fish, a dark rebuke
against desire’s aftermath. And then:
a Classic Persian jabs its paw
from a fuzzy peephole near Zack’s head,
precursor to the playful clause
that curiosity—the bane of cats—
can also kill a writer’s act.

 

He fell off the balustrade, another

small misstep toward glory, just one among

the litany of injuries my brother

has endured during his short life– each one

a peculiar work of art, prosaic

yet absurd. He’s the jester of martyrs,

the black comic who has enough nicks,

gouges, and breaks to have suffered,

all told, one fatal round of martyrdom.

More Buster Keaton than St. Teresa,

(whose beatific guise belies marble

but still does not suspend my disbelief)

he laughs, doubled over in the front yard,

then tries to walk, stumbling toward sainthood.

 

 

 

 

 

In the back room was an altar

upon which good men

 

sacrificed other good men

in the name of industry.

 

One day, these good men

sacrificed a righteous man

 

in the name of perfidy, and in time

they became executioners–

 

from then on, all meetings

became a record of their descent

 

and secrets were sealed in envelopes

and dropped into a fire at the edge of the city.

 

 

 

Bunker busters, daisy cutters, kill boxes, drones.

This is the vernacular of modern warfare,

it is a game of pecuniary stealth and precision

where weapons are fetishized and priced

like commodities in a market.

The war is sold on television

with charts, targets, backlit maps

and footage of dazed men and women

standing around the rim of a crater,

the camera hovering, disembodied.

We learn geography through war,

we learn a country’s grooves and divots intimately,

the lakes, the caves, the trade routes, the passes,

we trace the landscape as a hand

might gently caress a sleeping body,

and ultimately we learn patience:

how to kill democratically with bombs

and yellow food kits, how to be pragmatic

in our injury, and most importantly

how to spin policy to mask our revenge.

 

 

My arms wrap around your neck

as you slip through the long cattails,

pushing off from the bank

toward the center of the pond.

The sun dims with each stroke,

my fingers tighten.

Plunging to the bottom, we scrape the cold silt

and quickly push upwards,

the strange earth floating from our hands.

She’s been here before, brushing her palms against the grass

feeling only the distended thoughts that barely govern her own body;

there is a dazed reverence to the sun on her cheek

as if she had been purposely arranged in the field

with the hydrangeas and the broken stalks of milkweed.

She flares her nostrils. My breathing,  she muses,

is like a ball of thread unraveling to its invisible essence

or a cloud waiting to take shape.

Meanwhile, the sun consumes the afternoon

with an economy of self.

A  cross-dissolve would be construed

as too sentimental

for a non-antiquarian such as you.

Which is to say, you would prefer

the portrait of the young aesthete

enjambed against the image

of the ailing patriarch

like Kubrick’s up-cranked ape

hurling his blanched bone

heavenward, cutting

to an indolent craft in space

marking the epochs in between

Discobolus and that box of dreams

(which still entrances us

in the dark).

That would be you.

Fast forward through

the interminable exposition,

past the creaking dialogue,

ominous diagesis

and welling strings

past the ridiculous biopic tropes

of master, hemlock, and weeping

acolytes. In short, you would say:

“Cut to the fucking point.”