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.

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.

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?