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D.I am your Delilah, I will take your hair and your
bones to rattle against the cattails bruising the
night. Will you let me bind you to your chair or will
you struggle, as though you could? The rain is falling
on your temples, stroking that papery skin, grinding
it to a paste of pale, collecting the flinchings of
your untaught flesh. Each morning when you wake, your
fingers will be wounded, and you will know that it was
I who scored them with a papyrus jaw. Listen, listen
and you will hear the scour of the swamp in your
knee-pits, the slide of a cormorant through the water,
the twin arrows of its wake. Smile and I will bless
you with four fingers, smile and I will lie above you
like the lid of your coffin. On my sternum is carved
the constellation of Taurus conjunct, and only when
you have learned to drink the heat alone of your
coffee will you perceive the horns. The space between
my breasts will grow to encompass all the world. I
was never a girl, and perhaps someday I shall grow a
beard. I have never combed my sandalwood hair into
pigtails, I have never trailed ribbons across the sky.
In my youth my skin was slick and green, and I dwelt
in a circuit of water that did not end. Do you not
envy me this, the existence of a frog princess kicking
at the current, the joy of wind on my tongue and the
delicate yeasty suppers of black-bellied bees? I
smeared my face with blackberries and gasoline, and
cursed you even then though you were unborn. What
could you learn whose tongue never escapes the jailers
of your teeth? You cannot help your iconic form; I am
the saint-in-the-fields, but you are the saint riddled
with arrows fletched in a paste of webbed feet, the
moonlight fashions you a dusty corona, silver and
wicked, round as an eye. And the pattern of your
wounds is a language which only I speak, so that my
mouth becomes your gaping blood, smacking and pursing,
so that my tongue stops up your leaking flesh like
leaves of sacred basil, so that only I can speak your
beautiful death fluently and without a single mistake.
I know the grammar of your beatification, the syntax
of your stigmatic affliction and rapture, I deliver it
in verse, in hexameter, and the blood on your lips is
thanks enough. I require it as proof of purchase, my
darling and my own, for I have bought your soul as
surely as a gallon of sand.
Hush, hush now and sleep, for we are now in the boiled
land and the grey miles, sweeping our birch brooms
across acres of self, the long plains between the
thumb and smallest finger, the cavernous palm eating
bat entrails and red rock clay. Each step is an arrow
and a word, and when we kiss I take the word and the
feathered arrow from your pink mouth into mine, where
in the alchemist's oven of my throat they will bake
into gold. When I pass them back to you on the top of
my basilisk tongue they will poison you with light.
But I am patient.
I am the earth, wet and deep, sluicing around your
knees and calculating pressure by volume of your
tabernacle-calves. In my eyes you may read the codex
of river reeds thatched and woven by beetles, in my
eyelashes are caught the prayers of grasshoppers, high
and silver swinging censers. On my brow projected like
an arthouse film watch yourself grow old without
children, watch yourself return to me again and again,
begging alms which only I can give, the freeze-frame
of a lake in the darkness before you knew it contained
nothing. I throw ragged bones at your chest,
swamp-runes and the teeth of purified crocodiles, and
you will bear it because you require them as a bill of
sale. I am the temple at whose steps you collapse at
the end of days, to which to owe a hundred sopranos
cast in bronze. You have heard too much already to
escape my white staircase.
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