One expects a certain raggedness—
cracked and broken, bleeding in bad weather—
but clay has kept them clean, unlined and supple,
brushing the dust from the sheet
on which he makes his petition
begging the goddess relieve him of her blessing.
Cyprus sweats and sings through the window:
pigeons chasing boys who chased them,
women whispering the name he kisses
with a desiccating gesture: cool breath
through lips pursed like the papyrus
reed unrolled to hold the seething
sentiment she’s cozened. Her fault:
the suppurating star his cock
keeps seeking, the tumid tit that taunts
the tongue he tucks behind the teeth
he clenches. Her fault: the penetrating
scent staining his thumb’s
dumb hammer, witless peen he pressed
through beetled myrtle blossoms. He liked to feel
them give and pop, to watch
flame dissolve each busted cup,
kneeling in the temple as the priest
intoned the blessing. Mother of Desire,
wheedling goddess: what prayer salves
the sucking wound, slips a man
free from fervid orbit of the cunt’s
collapsing star? What he’d asked
was what he could constrain: an alabaster
virgin’s bashful glance, not this yielding
flesh flushed red with summer heat
and creased where she lay on a hem,
the line like the slip of his knife. Not the humid
breath that turns the chamber damp, the errant
hairs bristling her chin, her nipples
sprouting wire. Not the tongue
flopping boneless in the mouth
he had not carved. Something like a thought
unfurled behind her eyes, consciousness
bloomed like a dark drop of ink, then panic
when she had no words. What did she want
him to say. That when he was young
he saw a sparrow nicking fruit
and swallowing it whole? He still feels
the pit lodged in his throat, airless
terror swelled like a flag, still recoils
when hunger drives its chisel to the stone,
remembers tugging at his mother’s skirts
then the humming lump he found
buried in her thigh. By summer she was
ashes mixed with sand where girls
tiptoe to the cliffs above the sea
and giggling cast their votives to the surf,
dreaming the goddess will bless
their burgeoning desire. Bitter the furrowed
shell that sheathes the seed, the flesh
in which the germ is lodged, the small
machine from which a murderous
appetite unwinds. What the surgeon cut from her
had hair and half a crooked smile.
Teratoma it was called, monster-swelling.
Camphor calling forth the blood.
In the streets the children shriek
finders-keepers and the sound
from the next room is fingernails on slate:
she is learning how to say his name.

Lessons

poetry-magazinePygmalion

Pygmalion