Passiontide
Imagine: to ask
and to be answered.
Even the son of god
knows what it is
to beg and be met
with silence.
At noon the black sun
coats his mother’s eyelids
while everywhere
so much beauty.
I pray and the prayer
is beautiful
like the shadow
of a corpse.
I pray and knit
the silence
into something else.
My anger the hot heart
of a just slain fish
still beating.
My womb the wet
yolk of a coconut
losing water
over time.
*
Octopuses live
alone and do not
like to be touched.
Scientists once
fed them ecstasy
to make them tender:
a high dose caused
hypervigilance
a lowered dose
made them gentle.
Affection gained
by trickery
drugs
through the gills.
In this way
I was once married.
Back then
I asked god questions.
*
These last two
weeks of lent
worshippers wash
in spilled blood
together. A mercy
god does not give
his own son
who dies alone
the most human
he could possibly get.
Whether god
or an octopus
the question is
what is life for.
This passiontide
marks my sobriety
from illusion:
perhaps
I am not a worshipper
but an octopus.
Perhaps it is bearable
after all
to ask
without answer.
Like god’s son
I can wait alone
as the seed goes down
into darkness.
You see
the vast nothing
is holier than
the poisoned tank.
Renunciations
Quietly we have watched each other
with the intelligence of oxen. The light
in this room bare upon us, bared. Deep
inside me time is moving. Let us come
without clamour to be sanctified, against
histories and blank bodies and reasonable
expectations. Let us come. Nothing
to be explained away. Kindness must be
the last to go. All else we have carried
can be abandoned with vigour. Thus
we are forgiven; the past is a collapsed
tunnel. Let us kneel on this mattress. Let us
renounce with our hands the refusal
of adoration. Confession without
repentance. Flinching from the cutting rim.
With my mouth and yours let us forgo
old fictions of the immutable self.
Dithering addictions. Performance
without surrender and heaving hungers
making prey. In the scant wet air let us
renounce dowries and contracts doused
in shame of nakedness and the murk
of unspecified fear. Darling between us
let’s renounce joyless obligation,
spending mercy like coins, overripe
grief rotting and carceral. Renounce
all the walls in your head
in my heart everything.
It is simple enough now to say
No I don’t know. Yes I want. Yes
yes I really do want. Despite. Because.
Yes.
Letter to the dead
“When a bee-master dies, funeral biscuits soaked in wine are put in front of the hives so the bees may partake of their master’s funeral feast.”
— Household Tales With Other Traditional Remains, Sidney Oldell Addy, 1895
Afterwards I take the train and cross the river to the exam hall. I should stay in the carriage until a nearer stop, but a man glares at me for crying so I get off at Waterloo and walk. And so it begins. The life bureaucracy that comes after a death. The awakening in wet sheets, heart sinking and settling into all else drowned. I’m walking and all around me I hear the sound of cannons — carried violence in a child’s laugh and a mother’s scold and the chime of that big ugly clock. You weren’t you — too thin, too serious. I’m going to be late. If I fail this exam nobody here would care. The only ones who do are back home, bated breath and vicarious hope. The angle of your mouth — unnaturally prim. Later I learn they’d wired your jaw shut so it wouldn’t fall open. People are swarming the cloakroom and I haven’t brought my book. Silence in the royal horticultural hall. The sun leaks jaundiced through the ceiling as everyone starts scribbling, stuttered rustle of pages, annotated oracles consulted. I have to go by memory. Once they called Artemis Bee. Did you know? The soul spilled murmurous from her as an insect cloud. Once they believed in birthing bees from ox carcasses. The life of the bull passed into that of the bees, sudden and unquestioned. Where have you gone? Into whom has your life passed? Let me tell you something else I learned from Virgil. Honey, at first, is like water. It thickens as it ages, as it sweetens. When I visited your mother last week she handed me a tear-open packet of ginseng honey. My fingers brushed against hers, which once cradled your skull fresh and sticky from the womb. How lucky, I think. How sweet.
