—George Widener, “Sunday’s Crash”

No Loch Ness Monster Found

We dove deep into the hive, which had betrayed its sacrificial nature through a series of telegrams received in the capital.  It was no longer possible to attend the services of ash.  What I mistook for a frond insinuated itself in my nostrils; no nidor was ever so pleasant, nor as ripe for pillaging.  A vial of marvels flickered in and out on the dais, around which photography capered, dispelling the armor of the state.  My spirit was hidden in a pair of scissors, my fortune in an orange.  Redact this blue sky from every memory my soul has retailed, I instructed my servants.  I waited for sleep’s mask to extend like night onto the surface of the water.  Fur approached us, it glittered upon our necks like some dowsing instru­ment scrimshawed from poached ivory.  Winged creatures flew through vast quantities of water just to bring this sweetness to the prince’s lips.  I didn’t know him, having never lived in this world as a hunter.  You were my body, you sur­vived by travel when all the clocks were consigned to time’s brilliant enigma, you sang the visible echo, the immaculate comb.

Elvis (Not You)

O titanic wound through which biography flows, peel this apple with your scalpel-sharp nails.  I have brought it from the orchard of the soul’s iniquity where celebrity crouches, covering its gaudy genitals with its hair.  I purchased my sorrow from love’s garish kiosk and loaded it like a gun.  The forest is a fool­ishness but we enjoy its company, its broad eaves soughing in the breeze, its emerald lakes.  Around them childlessness coils its lithe and hungry body.  The animals watch from a safe distance, having shed their wings, which only some of them will regrow.  Every tree is a scar from which the chrism drips and we bottle it in this rowboat, which we paddle to the capital, half-capsized.  We will make a lot of money in the black light, sing the policemen on their syncopated beats.  If we try hard enough we can blend in among them, we can wear their darkened glasses.  I confess I never knew the names of all the living, when I moved among them.  Earth had me by the neck, death by the groin.  We made an awkward three-legged figure in the streets, each carrying the others’ crosses.

Dingo Baby Trial

At the edge of the rebirthing machine you tremble, holding out the pieces of your tongue in each palm as if somehow this could save you, could make something different.  You must have had a very large tongue for it to disassemble itself into so many pieces, which feel oddly heavy, as if they have somehow called gravity down to them, an invisible angel made of lead.  The surfaces have mostly dried so that they feel a little like sharkskin, when you shift your weight and can actually feel them as something more than weight, than presence.  From inside the rebirthing machine you can hear the faintest of musics, so faint you can’t be sure whether it’s a clas­sical aria, a pop song from your childhood, or perhaps merely the nonsensical twangle of an ice cream truck circling your neigh­borhood endlessly, suing for custom but unable or unwilling to stop for the children that stumble behind it, licking the blood from their dirty hands.

Mary Rose Lives Again

(But remember:  we are buried under all this humid air.  I fell in love with the marriage feast, the delirious passion of theft upon theft that made the city so much less a dress to me, a living thing playing out its own narrative against the beating of my six-chambered heart, a tent, a chord from which porters carried the gut­tural baggage of surrender to the gray ferry.  A dim loam surrounded me, but I recog­nized it for squander and instead built a golden scaffold, where I briefly paced and slept.  I was never tempted so much as when confronted with the lenity of beati­tudes, the residue of charity which dried and flaked against these mauve-ish prison walls.  Sheathing the blue flame against my thigh like a hunter’s knife I crept into the net, which glistened the way only mathematics glistens on the surface of abstract thought.  I touched it and was caught between worlds, both hand and voice half-lifted to the flag of absence bearing down on me from some great distance it would never absolutely cross even as the bride and groom left the darkening pavilion for the last time, their eyes little economies of scale my breath sank into, unrecoverable as a black box or a private script and just this once neither lusting nor spurning.)

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—George Widener, “Sunday’s Crash”

Knox County Rehab

Dear friend, I am not halfway through loving you.  The pearls of the night-birds shine in the elm trees like hair; they doff their brilliance towards the inanimate so that the animals, arrayed about and below them, glow with a creche-like light.  From my cell I divest them of their longing so that they may be innocent again.  The forest sweeps upon them like a silent storm I have been dreaming of for so long now that it has worn a furrow in my heart.  Dear heart, the seed the sun planted there has withered, won’t you now release the corpse so that I might deco­rate it?  Today is its feast day and all the churches are closed, you won’t feel a thing, I come to you with knuckles of rose hips, arms four-sided and sturdy as the stems of mint.  Tourists mistake the noise of the highway for the sea, or vice versa, but I am an anchorite and I recognize a cave wall when I see one, that is, with the palms of my hands.  They give off music like twin accordions; their lungs are books, and yes, sometimes they sting when you touch them.  Dear heart, dear vexless confidante, touch them.  We are alone together and the forest has grudgingly repatriated all we share, our dowries, the dew inside of which a dozen or more cities were found huddled, shivering, unnameable, unclaimed.

100-Year Elevator

Nothing new will happen; the calendar of our debts swims forward effortlessly through the shadows the trees make on the darkening ground and we are not, as they say, saved.  All through the night I had this feeling of ascending and descend­ing, as if some great ocean were touching me without my consent, finger-spelling all the names of God.  I was kept from loving myself by a diamond pane of glass inside of which a loaf of bread drifted.  Gifts of plate were elaborately described in the brochures, although my name was misspelled.  I polished my glasses so as to see the conductor more clearly.  He said:  When you find yourself dreaming in a language you were not born into, then you may call yourself a man, that is, a clawed being reproduced and reproducible, that melts back into the earth more slowly than snow.

Interim Female President

In this house built of weapons I am assembling a new praise.  It has a gender and the first thing it tells me is that I myself was an accident, an unexpected compli­cation in the contour of these gentle, fox-infested hills.  I was meant to be a world viewed best via painting; I was meant to be a report painting circulated in the market stalls of dawn.  Instead I am a laborer, and mud chinks the wheels of my eyes.  My son wanders blindly in the field of birds, waiting for them to clothe him in sorrow; he can’t hear my call.  He only knows me from the brightness of my reflection, from which sorrow is milled.  Under the new regime I am able to market myself in many forms around the world by air, land, and sea.  It is the ocean I know best, its sleek piano offering the keys of islands up to my touch.  Where are the animals—I keep asking—where are the eyes into which painting sweats?  I track them through the forest and into the hills.  My house watches me, its cannon cocked.  It is my house that brought the election to this continent, it is my house that keeps shedding blood, my house and the new praise I constructed inside it, that fits like a pair of perfect dentures, that chews.  And my house that swallows.  The scars are temporary, and primarily for the animals’ benefit.  A satellite appears in the night sky, a mirror cruelty has not yet broken.  Set my ship to sail against it now that I am homeless, now that my body is a dim grain the earth planes down.  Trees of lead lend their scales to the rain’s ancient heresy, from which the city models its green war.  Triumphal entry, beneath gender’s arch and flag; the speeches, the cavalcade of buds naked in the kitchen.  And the brass I polish them with, which I stole from my master, who left this life in a stone of fury just as the executions began, black beads bound to the carriage’s canted shadow.

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