Brian Swann

Who could have dreamed them up? At least snails have shells, but all these have is—nothing. Small black antennae like fat pins wave as if they could take in enough to get them through. Turn them over, they’re the soles of new shoes, pale and unmarked as babies. They flow, the soil itself learning how to move and, moving, almost staying still, their silver monorail the only evidence of where they’d been. And they die quiet, or at least (thankfully) out of the human ear’s range, between two stones, under heels, shriveling in salt or piss, at the tips of sharp sticks. Fight back, I hear myself say, do something. Don’t just take it. But they die as they had lived, exuding slime, like the smaller boys, who’d just stand there, miserable in short pants, school socks down to their ankles, school tie unknotted and askew, and flowing from noses slow cauls of snot that from time to time they’d lick or sniff back up part way, until it flowed again, coating the upper lip, falling into the mouth, mixing with tears before anything had been done, the fear itself enough, so even if we wanted we couldn’t let them off. Sometimes it was the knee “where you daren’t show your mother,” other times the kick in the shins, the stick over the head, the punch in the mouth, while they just stood there, or double up, gasping for breath, and we did it again.

I read that in this famous person’s poems “she searches for signs of what lies beneath and beyond the self.” Which seemed to me pointless, as if you wouldn’t know whether to paint with egg tempera or eat it. At eighteen, I came across Tolstoy’s “What is Art?” where he said an artist is different from other people because instead of eating an apple he paints it. Even then I thought why can’t he paint it and then eat it, the way at eight, the war just over, I stood shoeless in line in the snowy playground where one of the kids was handing out something that turned out to be small pieces of orange peel, something exotic we’d never seen before which I smelled, nibbled, and finally ate for this poem.

Knots, a thousand lights, in sheer dark, aimed at my window, tinny crystals, so mother dies in my sleep. The snow turns coarse, goes out. An axe sounds where I'd never heard an axe before. Breathing becomes dangerous. I can't help it, making me her, even before I was born, her brain burning out patterns I follow like will o' the wisps, sparks popping. I put on heels and find I can balance, twist my spine, bend to get my seams straight on my own, no one to call on, like she called me, sheer nylon turning on sheer skin under my palms. I pull on the ratty musquash coat. I have the body. I move off in it, eddying, trying to see who I am now. I totter down the street thinking, one day he'll be sorry. And here I am. Sorry. I watch her getting smaller up the road. I watch us both, till nothing's all there is.

We are in the position of defining myth by the shape of its absence. -Sean Kane, Wisdom of the Mythtellers The bluebird's cold mistimed egg fetched up from the one-legged box after the pair had left for points south & unknown (never, as it turned out, to return) I renested in the half-geode by the windowsill where it gleamed &, months becoming years, seemed about to last forever, grow more consistent with itself, holding its pure blue firmament up over what by now was nothing, till one January day, snow melting to a fast flood, I blew it softly onto my palm so I could hold its cerulean up against new sky, home against home, where it lay weightless & delicate as the Xmas ornament we'd just put away, but when I went to roll it gently back onto its bed, & leave it there, I saw a thread, a crack, another, watched it sink in slowly on itself, shard on shard collapsing from my touch & breath, relaxing into the shape of its absence