D. A. Powell

turns out there are no dead bodies after all unless you put them there

a stabat mater listen mother, he punched the air:   I am not your son dying the day fades and the starlings roost:   a body’s a husk a nest of goodbye his wrist colorless and soft was not a stick of chewing gum how tell?    well a plastic bracelet with his name for one.    & no mint his eyes distinguishable from oysters how?    only when pried open she at times felt the needle going in.    felt her own sides cave.    she rasped she twitched with a palsy:   tectonic plates grumbled under her feet soiled his sheets clogged the yellow BIOHAZARD bin:   later to be burned soot clouds billowed out over the city:   a stole.    a pillbox hat    [smart city] and wouldn’t the taxis stop now.    and wouldn’t a hush smother us all the vascular walls graffitied and scarred.    a clotted rend in the muscle wend through the avenues throttled t-cells.    processional staph & thrush the scourge the spike a stab a shending bile the grace the quenching mother who brought me here, muddler:   open the window.    let birds in

I can only give you back what you imagine. I am a soulless man. When I take you into my mouth, it is not my mouth. It is an unlit pit, an aperture opened just enough in the pinhole camera to capture the shade. I have caused you to rise up to me, and I have watched as you rose and waned. Our times together have been innumerable. Still, like a Capistrano swallow, you come back. You understand: I understand you. Understand each jiggle and tug. Your pudgy, mercurial wad. I am simply a hand inexhaustible as yours could never be. You’re nevertheless prepared to shoot. If I could I’d finish you. Be more than just your rag.

the pope has his cardinals batman has his robins shakespeare has a lark in just one of his sonnets

either the postagestamp-bright inflorescence of wild mustard or the drab tassel of prairie smoke, waving its dirty garments either the low breeze through the cracked window or houseflies and drawn blinds to spare us the calid sun one day commands the next to lie down, to scatter:      we're done with allegiance, devotion, the malicious idea of what's eternal picture the terrain sunk, return of the inland sea, your spectacle your metaphor, the scope of this twiggy dominion pulled under crest and crest, wave and cloud, the thunder blast and burst of swells this is the sum of us:      brief sneezeweed, brief yellow blaze put out so little, your departure, one plunk upon the earth's surface, one drop to bind the dust, a little mud, a field of mud the swale gradually submerged, gradually forgotten and that is all that is to be borne of your empirical trope: first, a congregated light, the brilliance of a meadowland in bloom and then the image must fail, as we must fail, as we graceless creatures that we are, unmake and befoul our beds don't tell me deluge.      don't tell me heat, too damned much heat

Then there came again and touched me one like the appearance of a man, and he strengthened me—Daniel 10:18 febrile body I woke into: nightsweats, stink of the toil of living: where hands could not bear to approach me, the young man fingered lay upon me, was himself a cool sponge, drew my perspiration to his lips ice-chips he held in his teeth, he pushed small bergs into my mouth caressed the skeletal arms I’ve hidden in long sleeves kissed neck and chest, belly rotten with pudgy organs, thick-set flesh he pressed against me, cock on cock and tongue against tongue saw his reflection in my marshy eyes and did not flinch such weakness held, sustained by this capable stroke, boatswain of my crossing I take the death I’m moored to, announced as a measureless promontory and bob in the river like a bloated corpse, blue lips, vacant gaze I let the water fill my lungs until they rip their festive piñatas because the one who comes to gather me, capricious angel has a voice that affirms me rising when this fever abates For Haines Eason

to say no more of art than that it makes, by its very distraction a mode of abiding accordingly, its variations:    each type of thread-and-piecework named double engagement ring, log cabin, or broken dishes all built on the same geometric figures— precise interception of angle and line so too each tale of love is rooted in that first tale:    the poet descending to the underworld finally granted his shade, who'll follow him only to disappear again.      perhaps one version has them reunite affixed in their solo chromospheres the stars, which, to the human eye, appear to overlap substanceless love immune at last to gravity and time— in texas (I might as well recount this as a story) there's a town with a courthouse built on concrete and twisted iron edified in red granite, capitals & architrave of red sandstone with point and punch, a carver broached the effigy of his muse he rendered her attractive features, down to the very blush of course she spurned him, of course there was another to whom she turned love should not be written in stone but written in water (I paraphrase the latin of catullus) the sculptor carried on:    not just the face of his beloved but the face of her other lover: snaggle-toothed, wart-peppered, pudgy them both, made into ugly caricatures of themselves, as wanton as the carver perceived them, and as lewd well, craze and degenerate and crack:   the portraits hold though, long since, the participants have dwindled into dirt beautiful.      unbeautiful.      each with an aspect of exactness tread light upon this pedestal.      dream instead of a time before your love disfigured, a time withstanding even crass, wind-beaten time itself

and yet we think that song outlasts us all: wrecked devotion the wept face of desire, a kind of   savage caring that reseeds itself and grows in clusters oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god’s own ribs what else but to linger in the slight shade of those sapling branches yearning for that vernal beau.   for don’t birds covet the seeds of the honey locust and doesn’t the ewe have a nose for wet filaree and slender oats foraged in the meadow kit foxes crave the blacktailed hare: how this longing grabs me by the nape guess I figured to be done with desire, if   I could write it out dispense with any evidence, the way one burns a pile of   twigs and brush what was his name? I’d ask myself, that guy with the sideburns and charming smile the one I hoped that, as from a sip of   hemlock, I’d expire with him on my tongue silly poet, silly man: thought I could master nature like a misguided preacher as if   banishing love is a fix.   as if the stars go out when we shut our sleepy eyes For Haines Eason

shepherdboy?   not the most salient image for contemporary readers nor most available.   unless you’re thinking brokeback mountain : a reference already escaping.   I did love a montana man, though no good shepherd rather: a caveman, came spelunking into that grotto I’d retreated to what light he bore illumined such small space—physically, temporally and did he have a grove of beech trees? no, no grove but together we found an old-growth stand of   redwood we gouged each other’s chests instead of wood:   pledges that faded he was not cruel nor I unwitting.   but what endures beyond any thicket? example: he took me to the ocean to say farewell.   I mean me: farewell to ocean the ocean, for that matter, to me.   us both fatigued, showing signs of wreckage and that man I had loved stood back from the edge of things he did not hold me I expected not to be held we all understood one another: shepherd understudy, ocean, me and did he go back to his fields and caves? yes, but they were gone strip-mining, lumber, defoliant, sterile streams: you knew that was coming weren’t we taught some starched sermon: the pasture awaits us elsewhere back up a moment: the forest you mentioned—remember, instead of a grove? untouched for the most part.   some human damage, but not ours we left no mark, not there in the midst of those great trees: not in the concentric rings that might have held us far past living instead, I put that man, like so many others, on paper— a tree already gone from sight where once it had drawn the eyes upward: the crest of a mountain.   crumpled thoughts, crumpled love shepherdboy, do you see the wild fennel bulbs I gathered for you olallieberries, new-mown grass, the tender fruits of   the coastal fig? I put them on paper, too, so fragile.   for nothing is ever going to last For Haines Eason

had no direction to go but up: and this, the shattery road its surface graining, trickle in late thaw—is nothing amiss? —this melt, the sign assures us,natural cycle and whoosh, the water a dream of forgotten white past aspens colored in sulfur, they trembled, would —poor sinners in redemption song—shed their tainted leaves I tell you what boy I was, writing lyrics to reflect my passions: the smell of a bare neck in summer a thin trail of hairs disappearing below the top button of cut-offs the lean, arched back of a cyclist straining to ascend a hill in the starlight I wandered: streets no better than fields the cul-de-sacs of suburbia just as treacherous, just as empty if wood doves sang in the branches of the acacias, I could not hear them anyone lost in that same night was lost in another tract the air pulsed and dandelion pollen blew from green stalks —that was all and yes, someone took me in his car.   and another against the low fence in the park at the end of our block.   under the willow branches where gnats made a furious cloud at dawn and chased us away I knew how it felt to lie in a patch of marigolds: golden stains the way morning swarmed a hidden rooftop, the catbirds singing the feel of ruin upon lips rubbed raw throughout the night granite peaks: here, the earth has asserted itself. and the ice asserted and human intimacies conspired to keep us low and apart for an ice age I knew you only as an idea of longing: a voice in the next yard, whispering through the chink a vagabond outlined against the sky, among the drying grass we journey this day to darkness: the chasm walls lift us on their scaly backs the glaciers relinquish their secrets: that sound is the ice bowing and the sound underneath, the trickle: the past released, disappearing you pinnacle of my life, stand with me on this brink half-clouded basin caked in flat grays, the very demise of green you have surmounted the craggy boundary between us. you open a place for me in earth, receiving my song —for Haines Eason