Cleopatra Mathis

It is not the angel riding a goat, trying to make him go. It does no work with refusal or guilt, which loves only its contorted self. But fancies instead my terrier’s long pink tongue, how it teases out the bone’s marrow, tasting with all its muscle. The angel is silver, but so is the goat and the box on which they perch, a Victorian gesture in the mansion where I spent the fall. They have followed me home, their permanent shine presuming, while around me, everything withered, slowly froze, and began its turn toward white. The snow is nothing but a great emptiness, and I’m tired of trying to find a secret there. But look—one leaf skittering across the glazed surface catches its stem to stand upright, the shape of a hand waving.

When I woke, the waves had gone black, turning over the macerated curd of the ocean bottom, heaving its sludge onto the beach. Some storm far out, I thought, had ravaged the sea, stirred up its bed, sent the whole mess flying to shore. At my feet I found a grave of starfish, broken and gnarled among the fleshy snipes and heads. Every shade of death covered the sand. It looked hopeless in the pale day but for the birds, a congress of gulls, terns, and the rarest plovers, calm for once, satiated, a measure of the one law: this sea will claim it all— feed them, catch them, grind their complicated bones.

She thinks it wants to kill, this wind, the wind with no mind—a transference to everything out there. Because she needs waking, the howling is meant to wake her, a self crying underneath her sleeping self, the stilted house groaning on the edge. For how many days now this dominating sea? Wind so absolute it rides the rain sideways and up, crashing out far beyond her until the anchor breaks away— waves take possession, smash the boat on concrete pilings. But isn’t this what she came for?

Dead deer a week now by the snowy gate. Do I have to watch it be eaten? Do I have to see who comes first, who quarrels, who stays? And there is the question of the night, what flesh preferred by which creature— what sinew and fat, the organs, the eyes. These appetites: it’s enough to know the swoop and cut of wings over the snarl of something leaping away. Do I have to see the icy figure fused to the ground, scrabbled snow, not lovely or deep, but the surface of something spoiled? By now the rib bones arch above it all, unbroken light shining between them, above the black cavity. And I hear the crows, complaint, complaint splitting the morning, hunched over the skull. They know their offices.

We pretended to know nothing about it. I withdrew to childhood training: stay out of swampy undergrowth, choked edges. This was around the time we were too cruel to kill the mice we caught, leaving them in the Have-a-Heart trap under the sun-burning bramble of rugosa. But moving up the trail, we caught a glimpse right at the start: the fox just over the hillock on the dune-side slope, spoiling the grass-inscribed sand. Neither of us looked— it seemed best to back away. On the dune’s steep side we surveyed what we’d come for: ocean’s snaking blues beyond the meadow, the silvered blade-like wands lying down. Lovely enough to hold ourselves to that view. But the currents of an odor wafted in and out, until the sweep of smell grew wider, wilder. The heat compounded, and ugliness settled its cloud over us, profound as human speech, although by then we were not speaking.

When the mule balked, he hit him sometimes with the flat of a hand upside the head; more often the stick he carried did its angry trick. The mule’s job was to power the press, iron on iron that wrung the sugar out of cane, circling under the coarse beam attached to his shoulders and neck. That mule of my childhood was black, remained blackly obedient as round and round he made himself the splintered hand of a clock, the groan and squeak of machinery chewing the reedy stalks to pulp, each second delivering another sweet thin drop into the black pot at the center. He hit him with a rag, old headrag, but the animal winced only with the thrash of a cane stalk itself—he squinted under the rule of that bamboo. The sun was another caning on his black-hot flesh. He was slow as the blackstrap syrup the boiled sugar made, so true to the circle he dragged we hardly saw him. We loved the rustling house of green cane, blind in that field of tropical grasses whose white plumes announced the long season’s wait. We yearned for the six-foot stem, the eventual six pieces the machete sliced at the joints, then the woody exterior peeled back lengthwise with a blade. It was a black hand we waited for, his job to lay bare the grainy fiber we chewed. That juice on our tongues was his sweetness at work. Chester was his name, he kept the mule.