O MAYEUX

Mutt

Even warm turf, touched
by your frost: the infinite,
green-brown furrows
at the forehead of this
sweaty Earth. The arpents
fall out, in humid chorus —
an imitation of the
cicadas and crickets —
as if the inert gasses
of soil held more than
a hollow, glassy tone. Yours
rings true for you, for now,
but is easily vacated, like
the space between us in this
tiny house of tin and cypress.
If there was a welcome, it was
not mine. The ground here —
what is left of it — would swallow
you up. Like I did, but with fire at its
rough old lips. This dirt mates with me
like a stray dog, up on its uncultivated
hind legs and howling, howling
like wind or thunder crashing against
us here in this shaking leaf of a trailer.
Do you know that it has been so long since
somebody has touched me like that, I mean
in a way that could intimate a kind of injury?
*
Lashings, pelts, spits – the rain and sirens blare,
sharply announcing the strict, serpentine births
of the tornadoes which, with alarm, swirl now
inside our drunken hair and so tangle like hot mists
on the humid clod. Pressure is barometric, held down
by movements beneath body or rhyme; reason itself
could not apprehend why your car, like some foolish
young mustang, gave itself to the fanged unknown and
was clawed in by those visitant highway spirits. My friend
believes in intervention, in fortune; I believe this land
hates you. And the thought kept me awake at night, that you
might die instead of me. And so I longed for you to kill me.
*
You unsheathe yourself and plunge into damp moss, here,
where death and love become confused. Desire like
something speared, sharp, a drive for life; but, here,
twisted in steamy, ripe manure. This place
of fecund decay, which must grasp you in
a rough, rowdy love – I see the swamp pull
you in, clammy hands at the throat of your
vapid consumerism, a possession too far. To
test your two crystalline appearances, shocks
of digital blue make the space between us cobalt
or draw out the oxygen. My tired jaw must clench
now, dental grind like a bayou fish sifting through mud
or the crab claws clamping down on some truth
of soft, soft flesh. Closed eyes, listening to the storm
breathing. Gently crashing against the thin walls,
its saliva sputtering through wireframe windows.
It is a wonderful privilege to be brought into contact
with an ability to travel through time and the psyche
in such a way as to touch an earlier part of ourselves
here, in this moment, at the mercy of hurricanes.
*
In a place where beauty is decay's infant, where
sod and clump and wad are freed: fibrous lichen
in flowering epiphytic cascades, green rush
against the bearded oaks, amongst sluggish
and devious waters. The photographs spoil:
quick flashes of brilliant pixels, silver chinks
like moonlight between the heavy canopy,
like hallucinations of the neural network
in branches and halogen. Your conceit was
to make of yourself an object, sculpture even,
as if you wrest an image from the gods who,
laughing to themselves, hand you only sand,
only sand. And all your islands surrounded us,
just then, as the lightning took up its glinting
mantle in the bleach of your teeth, or the vault
of sky where, I was sure, I had once seen your eyes.
*
Held in sensu stricto, like a telephone or a door,
or like a breath under leagues of pressing water.
The longest weight of your sleep becomes you,
like a cloak. And you are made boy again, not
canine or lutrine; no weasel's keen glitter, no
speech razor-edged. And so I dress up in
the verbs of your language, falling between
the gaps from where they were moved. Il s'
agit d'un double-contact, I whisper into
the hearing oracle of your sleeping ears:
their spiral into asymmetry drawing me
further and further away from what, I
think, once had been here. And still, still
the rain. As if this were the end of a myth,
not a night. As if the whole world might
be carried away on the force of its torrents
and the sinking ground pool up into rivers
and lakes. And into the great swamp,
*                                                                           oh infinite spirit.
I did believe, as I carried you to the vehicle
of your death, that the roads would swallow
you up, that trouble comes in threes, that I
might never know why I must, even here,
insist on such a terrible violence for myself.

Language art by O Mayeux includes Artefacts (Post-Asemic Press, 2018), btwyx.txt (Damaged Goods Press, 2019) and stray poems in various journals.