Tory Dent

in your arms it was incredibly often enough to be in your arms careful as we had to be at times about the I.V. catheter in my hand, or my wrist, or my forearm which we placed, consciously, like a Gamboni vase, the center of attention, placed, frail identity as if our someday-newborn on your chest— to be secluded, washed over in your arms often enough, it was in that stillness, the only stillness amidst the fears which wildly collided and the complexities of the illness, all the work we had yet to do, had just done, the hope, ridiculous ammounts of it we had to pump from nothing, really, short-lived consensus possibility & experiment to access from our pinched and tiny minds just the idea of hope make it from scratch, air and water like manufactured snow a colossal fatigue the severe concentration of that, the repetition of that lifted for a moment just above your arms inevitable, pressuring it weighed down but remained above like a cathedral ceiling, strangely sheltering while I held tightly while there I could in your arms only there, the only stillness remember the will, allow the pull, tow against inevitable ebb— you don't need reasons to live one reason, blinking in the fog, organically sweet in muddy dark incredibly often enough it is, it was in your arms

"If you cut off my hands, I'll offer you my stumps." If you knock out my teeth, I'll still go down on you, conscientiously, vine along a trellis, and suck you with my gums. If you smash my toes, employing an ice crusher, one by one, I'll heal myself with such truancy that someday I'll run on my knees. "If you cut off my hands, I'll offer you my stumps," and orchestrate a standing ovation with the memory of my hands representing each that are dying, each that are dead, each forgotten that we refuse to remember like the lost hands of stumps. So much misery in plain sight like tears streaming down a face; so much misery hidden like the eventuality of the anti-Christ; and so much incognito like the accompanying instruments of a torch song: like the fire in the torch itself, like the torched interior of the song. If you cut off my ears, I will listen with my eyes to the spitting death of cavalrymen as they're roasted over an open fire; to the smallest bones snap, dry as sun-seasoned kindling of the young and truant witch when she's pressed by a thousand stones; to the brave convulsions of the communist strapped in the electric chair, dying by degree...not unlike the commonfolk plucked from the village, arbitrarily, one last December night, stripped to the flesh and heaved high into the freezing air upon a whittled stave, tall and sharp, thrust deep into the asshole they die by degree, ever so slowly and often only (if not by freezing first, which, if merciful, God deems) when the wooden point finally pierces the brain, brain-dead already from the mauve anticipation and ear-splitting prerequisite of pain. If you cut out my tongue, I will write you a letter, a love letter lovelorn for that taste of your tongue. If you fuck me hard I can never make love again, I'll plant hyacinth bulbs in an effort to replace my abolished fecundity. I will turn eternally on my side and pull down my pants and listen to your masturbate while fantasizing about my ass. I'll admire the willow out the window when I hear you come and allow as if in tribute to the times I used to participate, a vague expression of pleasure, albeit contrived to wash across my face the way my desire for you, real as a willow, once had done.

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. Their irregular branches, like broken arms backlit from MRI dye, offset by yearning. They take form in ways only experts can decipher. The light is blue. The observation of the alien doctor flickers in his iris, furnace gaslight burning like a pagan memorial. The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God, I pity their need for idolatry. It bares itself only to the void of me, Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility. I am unable to convince them otherwise. I hear them mew and compete as if for a rough teat's clear nutrition. Foolish rule of the organic, uncultured and out of control. I am mum and tidy as a nun in comparison. Though capable of devastation are my desires which punish the landscape with recrimination, uprooting the hedges. They swallow fire, speak in four languages, and love no one. I shudder with pride as they push themselves back to their origin, to the scraped-out bottom of a uterine nothing; this hard loneliness, skull-solid, pushed back into vagueness until it succumbs as if overwhelmed by barbiturates. Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place Separated from my house by a row of headstones. Its green vapors trigger an olfactory déjà vu like a recurrent nightmare. I envy the buried faces finally freed from worry and ailment, from the pressure to remain always forward-thinking. I picture their release, the prostrate bodies floating up as if levitated. What peace, what stillness was shoveled onto their pine box beds where darkness then dropped, all at once, final as an execution. I simply cannot see where there is to get to. The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. I identify with its nausea. It meets me in the mirror uninvited, this face beneath my face, restless and unwilling. It formulates inside me like a kicking fetus and refuses to be ignored. It haunts and threatens like a past trauma. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; mute as a mug shot, it is quiet, like someone suffocated who suddenly stops struggling. I recognize in its warm death the expression of the starving With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here. Against me a force, not stronger or more intelligent, but more adaptable to poor weather like dandelions. I can feel it whittle me down to horse feed pellets. I'm being winnowed out of the earth's circulation, with a pairing incremental as this winter's passing. Twice on Sunday the bells startle the sky— Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection. I'm forced to listen to the liturgical lecturing, truant student of a catechism I loathe. At the end, they soberly bong out their names; Myths and ideals I could never bring myself to believe in, my prayers, the self-flagellation of unrequited love. The yew tree points up like a New England steeple. It has a Gothic shape. It used to remind me of home. The eyes lift after it and find the moon. Once fragile as rice paper, it hangs static and tough like a noose signifying more hardship ahead— interrogating flashlight that hurts my eyes. Now no home exists—just an empty bed, a pile of mangled sheets atop a dark wood floor, like snow atop the frozen mud tracks of hoof and wheel. The moon is my mother.She is not sweet like Mary. She licks her white feathers and stares back with one eye vicious as a swan about to bite. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. I watch, my leg caught in the truth of my life where beyond human emotion I've traveled at this point. How I would like to believe in tenderness— in those symbolic unions that elicit sweet concepts: mother and child, father and daughter, husband and wife. The face of the effigy, gentled by candles, its cheekbones flushed with an afterworld favoritism Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes; hair waving, mouth parted in mid-speech like drowned Ophelia. I have fallen a long way. I lie at the bottom, smashed like a dinner plate against kitchen tile, china chips and jagged bits. I lie at the bottom, shattered and dangerous, looking up with a baby's stunned engrossment. I'm moving closer to Pluto and Mars. Clouds are flowering blue and mystical over the face of the stars,— It will not be quick. Death drinks me in, slow as syrup. Inside the church, the saints will be all blue. They've ascended into heaven's oxygen-deprived morgue. Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews, Their hands and faces stiff with holiness, mannequins perennially enacting the nativity in a wax museum. The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild as one dying of cancer. She begs for relief, but her pillow-muffled shrieks disperse with the other sounds and shadows of the night. We are left alone, her cadaver face, gaunt and grim, prescient of mine. And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence. Sylvia Plath, "The Moon and the Yew Tree," Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1961)