BRONZE AGE
Their revolution painted on a wall. Revolution
scent in the rust-colored dirt, and the rat-heavy
palms, and the blue diesel smaze over the former
capital. We waited. On the corner, insistent laughter.
On the corner, a turned over bus—flame bathed
to the metal. Our tape measures cocked,
as per our orders. We were given
a belt each and a night. Mine was short-haired.
with jagged white gear teeth and a dirt-sniffing
mechanism for quicker dirt sifting
and much data to desist. Lots: “Encada barrio…”
and “our ideas are our weapons.” Among other things.
Revolution, revolution. Faint image of the revolution’s
big man on the plaza clock. Drawn in wrought iron.
Splashed on a smock. The sounds we watched for:
night wind cracking canvas sails; wood stick
rhythmically striking wood stick; hastily made
motorcades’ ragged sirens. The revolution?
Through our high powered geigers: twin-stroke
underbuzz of revolution’s engine; the puttering
three-wheeled revolution; the landless campesinos
beaten by pots and pans into land and nothing
we could do. They resented our husks.
“Of two eyes one always lies,” this we knew. We planned
removing the other, replacing it with Jefferson dirt:
dirt of the sea, empire dirt, wind down from the north
dirt, father dirt, dirt of scallions and ghost
galleons. The elephant god Jefferson. Trident
in one hand, another with axe, snake in another
and in another his reigns, steering his eight rat team,
as through the green clouds they steam.
On Jefferson’s neck a lush green alligator hung
from a bone chain like a hymn. As always. Family
bones, yet distant; somewhat empirical and fencing
the hill, long shards of oxidized metal. There went
tradition, bronze titan. The balcony scene:
swarms of wetblack hair surrounding
wetblack rocks on the tree-less frozen
sand expanse. Once the show trials were over
we would get to work, but quietly. Such were our orders.
Swimming style analysis, certain constellations
notated from the tattered revolutionary cupolas’
ceilings, hands to secure a detainee’s head (placement
and number). In their revolutionary stories the sound
of dirt on animal skin drums was like the sound
of a blinking eye roving wild in its socket was like…
Their revolution had its big man and its new man tales
of the monolith sky. We had our love.
CRUELTY
When I was eleven, I watched my cousin slice up a gopher
with the serrated top of a tin can.
I see this cousin now: the type of woman
who simmers meats in vodka and cream.
Straight shoulders, straight hair. Her stare.
Each eye bright and sharp as a rhinestone.
She knows a thing will yield if spoken to gently,
so she doesn’t waste time on incense
and Sarah Vaughan. She wraps each word in cashmere,
and carries on. Last night, three girls at a bus stop
beat an old man to death with black umbrellas. And here I am
bound to elaborate on the state of his glasses,
knocked off his head and spinning into air
that shimmered with rain. Yet everyone, when small,
has come in from the river with something half-dead
in the bottom of a bucket. And no one expects that to become
their defining moment. Now, I want to find a red door
and live behind it. I want to talk taxes and fiscal responsibility.
I am sure neither of these things will happen.
Her under voice is sleepless as a shark.
It says crack that window. Dial that number.
At eleven, it pulled me from the TV, it led me
up the driveway, behind a parked Subaru, to a square
of dead November grass. The wind was fresh
and sweet as an apple, as she brought the metal down
with a calm hand, and teeth denting her lower lip.
And she steadied the animal, saying
shhh, stay still, don’t worry, my dad’s a vet.
From 1996 (Anansi, 2013) by Sara Peters
HAIL
Hello from inside
the albatross
with a windproof lighter
and Japanese police tape.
Hello from staghorn
coral beds
waving at the beaked whale’s
mistake,
all six square metres
of fertilizer bags.
Hello from can-opened
delta gators,
taxidermied
with twenty-five grocery sacks
and a Halloween Hulk mask.
Hello from the zipped-up
leatherback
who shat bits of rope for a month.
Hello from bacteria
making their germinal way
to the poles in the pockets
of packing foam.
Hello from low-density
polyethylene dropstones
glacially tilled
by desiccated,
bowel-obstructed camels.
Hello from six-pack rings
and chokeholds,
from breast milk
and cord blood,
from microfibres
rinsed through yoga pants
and polyester fleece,
biomagnifying predators
strafing the treatment plants.
Hello from acrylics
in G.I. Joe.
Hello from washed up
fishnet thigh-highs
and frog suits
and egg cups
and sperm.
Hello.
GUN DOGS
And I’ve unleashed the dogs, out of season,
on days so hot all solids seemed to rise
from a quantum and kindled crux of yeast.
Slipway boats venting through unseasoned gaps,
paint roughed to a barm and the blisters
of green balsam rupturing on contact,
until my hands, drawn tight with a flexed mesh of sap,
hardened like two heels of bread. The gun dogs,
tongues loose, would spring on a hot scent
as though to free their paws from ground frost;
hound voices shattering the heat so completely
a dazed sun straggled a moment to piece
the light back together again and regain
its train of lumbering thought. And somewhere
from the understory, a snowshoe hare
would harness that great mutant heart in its chest
and slingshot into naught. I’d wait for the dogs
to circle, wait for their yawps and gutturals
to set borders as far as their voices would carry,
wait beneath spruce and birch boughs hung
with the curve of a boat’s bow or the arch
of a nave infused with stained light. There’s a point
when a beagle turns a comer and changes
its voice from pursuit to driving forth, when the sound
tugs a drawstring at the burlap of your nape,
when persistent dogs swing to push home,
when they close the distance and nutshell the time
left to reckon with the headwind of a bark
that assembles its mass and leaps as four paws
from a camouflage of brush. Always willing
to start over, go further than need, the hounds
would drive a hare down the burrow of a muzzle
without fear, without shying off. I’ve felt
the gun dog’s turn without a weapon in my grasp,
in the absence of prey, at times and in places
where no dog ran, or was, or had a right to be:
when I loitered in dark corners and put flame
to a glossed patch of gas at the crossroads station,
when I woke in a sub-zero bus shelter with hair
cold-bitten to the hard floor, when I steadied
my father who leaned too far to one side
three days after the first of his brothers died.
Other times, like standing with a lug wrench
in a fog-clot on the isthmus with the hazards tripped
or when my first Selected Frost split
at that place in the bind where “Birches” starts.
It's surged in the circuit and called me out
when I’ve missed the point or burned it black,
when I’ve holed up in a corridor of sound
just to feel the echo swell and contract.
