Foretold
Binary
Recollection
The Last Time I Saw God
Standing by the water
I remembered
the delicate and confused
dream I had last night
it was bruised
even in the remembering
so these words
can only glance
sidelong at the beehive
that replaced my heart
with all that pulsing
making honey from the loss.
The woman in the dream
said be careful with your cock
and I suddenly knew
in the way one knows in dreams
that my cock had somehow become
a lever that might detonate
a string of bombs riddling the city
in the way blood clots might lace
a body in its final days.
When I realized I was holding
a rooster, I did not exactly
know what to say. Perhaps
I smiled. I don’t know.
There was no mirror
and I’ve never been able
to see myself in dreams.
The story is such a story we don’t always stop to think
about what it was like to be there: that cavern floor
packed with pungent dung, dark as the inner bowels
of an animal when that slab dropped into place: how
utterly it sucked to hear the oaf stirring in his stupor
made uneasy by wine mixing with the bolted flesh
of good friends dispatched while we watched—
it was just a flat-out bad deal for everyone involved.
Polyphemus messed with no one: a law unto himself
there in the hinterland eating goat cheese by the ton
and Odysseus brimming full of the sauce of himself
after out-clevering all Ilium by nestling in the stallion.
He’d had plenty of time to think there in that hollow
belly smelling of fear and fresh sawdust holding his
piss in one endless clench counting droplets of sweat
rivering cold over his ribs and under his breastplate.
And now here he is again groping for his sharpened
pole in pitch dark using one appetite to feed another.
He lays the point in the drowsing embers and jostles
it enough that the cave appears in a blood-warm glow.
You probably know the rest—plunging the blackened
tip through the eyelid, the crackling hiss as the eyeball
burst, the geyser that shot from the socket—then huge
hideous blind rage: it was easy to get inside, he thought,
the real trick comes in the getting out: words that might
land differently if you are not clinging to the fetid locks
under a ram, knees pinning its rib cage, your hips held
high as it drags you slowly into the chill morning air.
Maybe then you’d feel the warmth of Polyphemus’s
wounded breath, washing across three thousand years
as he crouches above you, stroking the woolly backbone,
inquiring why this particular one lags so far behind?
We walk to the edge of town: there
just beyond the wall we see clouds
of crows and ravens, also buzzards
teetering down to pick apart the flesh
that peeks from every flapping shirttail.
See that belly pale as risen dough?
The dark oaks creak with the dead
weight that hangs from their limbs—
ropes taut with bodies barely turning.
We gather on the wall, idly and in pairs,
looking out across the charred fields
and the smoking timbers of a farmhouse.
By noon, the hum of flies will lull our ears
into dreaming orchards thick with bees,
but now in the chill of morning it is mostly
the scrape and croak of birds just starting in.
Someone has knotted an enemy banner
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