Ray Dunkle
Concrete Mother
Somme Purgatorium
I
Some poets are famous for killing crows
they destroy their nests, they wear their feathers,
they praise the dead in order to bury the living
while the lusty reflection of stars upon girls' breasts mocks them-
There is no death-
There is no death when their soles crash the tiny bones,
when their toes are tickled from the dead feathers,
when they lift their skirts up so the boys melt masturbating -
There is no death-
There is no death
when they chew their gums their mind rages from loins aflame;
in the pink bubbles they see oceans, they feel semen in their milk
And there is no death
There is no death,
unforgiven.
II
My brother, listen to me
If for a moment
I will not say something that you will not forget soon.
The moon reflects the graves
(Same colour
Same smell)
and the screeches the wind throws on my face
make me hesitate to talk to you about poetry
for an owl is watching...
What is poetry if not
the violent estrangement of
everyday life?
Lilacs assassinated many poets obsessed with
wringing the silver out of stars with their hands.
They had mimosas for hair
and their breath betrayed the dilettante toil of their hearts;
for them the sea was the lazy eye of god, their fridge was their garden, addling the wraps of sliced meat with beasts in the jungle, wondering about the perfect stillness of neurotic fish waiting to be eaten and why the silver is the darker shade of black.
They were bodies without organs migratory coffins from one continent to another discontent, eternally being around a sun that refused to burn them. The world is unbearable. So they said. (Some poets are famous for not killing themselves) One bird, one angel with a beak of iron, stood by their side aloneand hungry still. (It saw many forests in its life though it was the streets that made it feel comfortable as his red wings mingled perfectly with the ivies of blood reaching the distant windows.) It remembered a dead soldier from the Great War (Some poets bearing thorns die like cut roses and those we kill)and how it dipped its head on his heart to drink. As it pulled out its head a drop, a small drop, a tiny drop of blood ejaculated high and the sky collapsed. Ashes were the bones of the blue and suddenly the soldier realised that his life was nothing but a ballet for broken legs. For one moment he thought What is a man if not a dying god? he wanted to cry but it was too late. For if his heart were a limestone he could have waited for the sea to come to embrace her, scratch her, beat her and kill her with her charming mouth. And the bird would be starving. This is the reason, my brother, why I don't read poetry anymore. What to do with the sunsets? And why to write about them?You have been wiser than me, my brother, you already knew that a man is nothing but a nightmare that tries to forget his past. So long, for I shall forget you.
III
I woke up
for a brief moment
and the night had erased your face
- your eyes, your nose, your mouth -
everything had disappeared
as if an invisible hand took a sandpaper
and swiftly polished them.
Some stars shone
with their usual indifference yet I knew
that your breath made them shiver.
For a moment the night was not a colossus
maddened from the loss of his dominion,
for a moment the night was the soft skin of my son
untouchable by breaths of ghosts and glorious
and a poem wrote
itself.
Absinths distilled are your eyes
Absinths distilled are your eyes,
alive pearls and ivy thunders,
red grapes are your breasts
made of blood from bitten lips.
My fingers are trees made of snow
and you are spring.
How can I reach you?
How shall I embrace the August of your bosom?
How shall I devour you
when I am chained to a pole in flames?
When I am a shadow magnetised by your body,
swirling around the solar clock of your life?
for Petra Whiteley
Ray Dunkle was born in 1972. You can find his work in Eviscerator Heaven, ditch, The Glasgow Review, Disenthralled and in Counterexample Poetics.
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