Work Text:
boy with blossom
Care is for
the powerless. Power snicker-snacks. Instead summer drips its dog-belly warmth over him,
besieges her flesh hand to thigh. Question
without answer: breathe How do you feel, breath scuffing the beautiful and
unlockable joints of her face, which have no fixed feeling, like a piano untuned,
a mouse-et pudding, a starlet cast by sunshade, every word she left unsaid
and he would have kindly unheard. To give tea/half-sandwich/well-wishes—her expression as cool and tightly cloaked
as an apple—when once dragons he took by the sword. Girls by the mouth. Now
powerless, he is ungirded, stripped of his guardian wolfskin, his steely aspiration, shed of mantle and control;
he knows not which part of him slips into the schoolyard banner
or the curry cauldron or each maiden
with one petal pinned yet to her suit. But how he cares for them, how he can! Sweet hearts, their honeyed blood
lifting his staircases and spine, he cares whether they rise by slap or his hand to their thighs,
their nude lips, their eyelids. He must open
all these gifts. He must envelop their bearers in his fine wool.
Hatch
Things Tanaka-sensei taught us about cooking
You have to use your heart. If it squirms
in the ramekin, all the better. Go out to the courtyard,
cast your cookie cutter under moonlight
and watch a girl emerge. At first she'll be stage-fraught
but if you butter her up and give her a frog's ear
she'll wear it, and sing like a blackbird
or raven. Taxonomy finds difficulties in those
who, hope-drained, are more feathered, but at least
you can reference chickens: dressing is preparatory.
Things Inoue-sensei taught us about geography
Compass rose. When you cling to one clear floating thought
between valleys of terror, or anguish, or love, thank
all those children who prepared your path to the
telescoping tower, frilled as it may be with stairs.
Along this, young goose, you migrate. Your throat's lump,
your chest's sinking stone—they know their north;
build them into the archway, accumulated one burden
at a time, that marks your soul's departure.
storm warning
Every cold enclosed place protects you; the more constricting the enclosure
the better the protection. Stand in the bell-tower, higher than
any pedestal, and the courtyard is a white plaster
on the face of the earth, by shape a tomb. If you were there
every noise would echo, nothing is solely yours, it would be safe
to feel your emotional apparatus creak like an unused voice: it wouldn't be you
who looses that sound when her elbow's wrinkles rub your arm. You have
an unpierced shield, it wouldn't be you who let in all those outsiders
and calluses, this little smile unwarded by lenses, her pink White Day lamp
where once all whiteness was white, all roses equivalent in color, that teach
you the different intentions of light. No one is hail or flood, no sass strikes
from the sky as fire, but still you are lifted in her wake
and flung, like a good knife, against walls that solidify
as never before. You were admitted once, ghost,
through these ceilings one-way, the only way through was forward,
unseen and deflecting behind your mirror; but know, indecorously hugged,
berated, allowed to stab, that the other way through is out.