Proteus

To take, like water, whatever shape you flow through, fill, or rest in. And to choose that shape. *    *    * As: Brian, become a gangster, six feet from my face. Voice no longer a caress but a sharpened projection, belly a ram in a buttoned vest. The whole body shows the thing done: goat-song in the rites of a god, transforming, starting to speak now through him as he walks on stage. *    *    * Remember when you turned into moonlight, the bark of an oak, an orange going to shreds in your own cold palm? Everything you saw you were, and you saw everything. No choice. That face light gnarled around a tree was your face. *    *    * Flesh is approximate. We clothe it in dreams, wrestling with our eyes closed down through layers: thug, wraith, chieftain, devouring angel (held by my shoulders I am trying to make you stay put) daddy mama breath balm a man a woman in separate desires overlapped. *    *    * Curious, cautious enough to disguise himself as a woman, the voyeur peeks at the rite. Women, leaping, mothers and daughters— their rapt beauty draws him out. The god has tricked him: they will tear him apart. *    *    * As: a virus. Never alive, but a frantic mimicry of life to pierce the cell, make over its orders, move, repeat itself, mutate in sped-up mini-evolution— now it swims the blood, unravels in light, never alive, now it floats on air. Lost in the host a thousand years, inert chemical mechanism asleep in a rain-forest cave. *    *    * To mime— not a statue or a gray accountant picked from the crowd, but a robot. Steel jumpsuit and boots, greasepaint turning the eyelids aluminum. This hand a crank, this grin the edge of a disk, I am Mister Silver Mister Silver—tape loop syncopating over the drum machine. *    *    * As: a child’s toy, its intricate language of joints and swivels, creature within creature: the robot a wolf on silver feet, in his boxy jaw the tiny half-robotic head of a man who will drive the car. *    *    * Who will drive the car to the hospital after the cancer has metastasized? *    *    * These knots rising in my palm— look, in the photo album, he grips the mower like a sad hawk. Grandfather, father, son—flesh tightens, branching genes send up more of the claw each year. After the operation skin comes back thick as bark. *    *    * A boy, a lion, wild boar, snake no one will touch holds the changes. Dream he is a sea god, and he is. Dream he is a stone, a bull, no, a tree rippling over the waves’ quick light, he is shape always becoming, he is a flame and the stream that drowns it.