Body Horrors

 

 

There are truths in our most ancient

Body horrors. The men with faces only

Seeing from their stomachs: they may still exist.

The women who kept a mouth at the deep

Dark back of their heads, hidden in hair,

Untouchable and treacherous. The strange

Grey ladies who knew too much, and cut the twine

Of life out, sharing one clear vision between them;

Great men with one line of sight, in their own heads;

And the younger girls, who sounded harmless enough

And ruined ships. In my time I’ve met them all,

Done deals with devils, shared my bread with hags,

Drank furiously with a faun or two. Their kind

Has danced with us, one way or another, ever since

We invented them: their bodies are our bodies,

Their treacheries ours, their every malice, ours.

 

If anyone ever tells you that you look out of shape, think about Marco Polo’s nonsense-creatures and consider yourself well and truly in shape. 

Fingerprint

 

 

At the moment I am trying to unlearn a few dated techniques in my writing: slavery to certain rhythms and meters, structures and suchlike. This is a brief poem about the patterns we do learn. 

 

 

To start, the image of myself though clean lacked

Practicality.

I, like a clear blue sky, lacked any

Agency,

An empty glass vessel, unmarked and

Fragile in an uninteresting way.

A pristine snapshot of thin air,

A canvas of pure Klein blue.

Now of course your fingerprints are

All over me, my speech, my tongue, my

Throat, every sound I make.

I learned a pattern from you,

I was a pattern of you, I remain

A pattern. Even the twist

In the wineglass stem between fingers

Left its mark.

Forensically

One can detect a unique pattern not just

From the deoxyribonucleic acid but

Also fingertips, true, and also

The tongue; also the ear, unique to us all

In infinitesimally small and delicate ways.

The imprint, as evidence, has successfully

Condemned several men.

So in these respects

Intimately with these tongue and fingers

And patterns traced within my ears

I am a marked surface,

Retracing these patterns.