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Asymmetrical Hybrid

Introspection

(for Anna Freud)

1. from Troy to Aulis, with a few stops

Dissonance
she wrote once to her father
is like a dream in which it all happens
later

there as I’m led
all I am is in the house
but all the future is shocking

with its exquisite
fear under me, starry-eyed
black black black
black sea

ecumenical
tea-service

Sevres
I push a drawer close
open
who’ll oil it

who’ll come for me when the house shakes
who’ll shorten my life

like a fist

the house sits on stilts
it is a live wire
in a merry-go-round of weather

and there is the boy rummaging through my life again

he’ll find it
if he looks

the skin is broken into
my room is ransacked

in eight seconds we’ll see how the back of it
is like a tor glowing with missiles

tower
this way, maniac

2. Mexico

That night she had a clear dream in which they were dying in Spain.
There were flowers in the room–gardenias–angelica on the nightstand.
A mandolin player played. She had bit her lip and so she watched him

leave, wiping blood on the pillow.

(silence)

(distinguishing mouth)

It was the smell of betrayal, she said.
It would straighten him.

He had the fear of the wolf, also.

3. something in the room

because it was wretchedly late

because she had taken something mechanical, she had taken it apart

a clock only two hands to go
baby
en face regarde-là do not kill me

she banged it onto the mantle

she threw it onto the floor

she cursed

and she wished that there had been a fire underneath it

that he had stepped into the circle

4. a jugular

Now he says
I will sit behind you
I will wait on you
always handless

let us reconcile

You can turn around at just
any time
you want

I’m sorry

she says now
I will believe you
speak French

garotte
bien

You can watch

annihilator
annihilator

she falls into the moon, the full moon,
for seven straight days

originally published in The Melic Review, Summer 2005

Jay invites heresy, and resumes the ark

Jay had a new fear of drowning. It was like the old fear
he’d had, of a shipwreck–but tender, inexplicable,
almost. There was nothing to sailing. And yet
when the paper came, on Sunday, he’d circled the ad:

RED. SHINY. MAY LEAK A LITTLE.
OTHERWISE, GOOD RUNNING COND.

He loved in particular that last word, mechanical.
It was like a dumbbell, a whip he would like to rub, again.
Golden apples, what a torment! Ingots of rain!
To know waves pounded from tinny foil!

He began to shiver, even in dreams. While all the worlds
turned into squalls, and he was learning to make buoys
by wiggling a dowsing rod.

“traveller”

Alley & Diner