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G. I chose you, I chose you. It was into you I reached
with my crocodile fingers, into your ribs and your
stomach and your spine, into all that sucking red, the
sulfurous sick of your liver on my white hands,
searching for the calculating pearl, the incandescent
blister of light that would mark you as mine, my own,
my beloved. I chose you for the sweat-damp of your
hair on your pretty neck, for your birthmarks and your
capped molars and your tragic jawline. The water
moccasins all purred and writhed when you passed,
thecranes danced three circuits round their nests, the
tamarinds chanted twelve sestinas in your honor. Are
we not pleasant, are we not beautiful and sweet? We
chose you, to streak you in the glycolic mud of the
marsh, to darken your lips with palm oil, to clamp our
severing mouths on yours and transmit our jangling
tongue, our language of brimstone and loam. Will you
not smile for me, my little one? You are precious and
secretive, my pupil with your pink erasers and clouds
of chalk. I shall stand before you and sew your lips
shut with the thread-strands of my hair and the
mumblings of your embroidered face, your charming
closed-curtain elocution will be our very own, and no
one shall overhear. I shall hold your eyelids open all
through a thousand and one nights, catch you by the
scalp and write sonnets with my nailson the back of
your neck. And when it is over, when it is done and I
take back my braids from your
trembling, you will burn to give back to me all the
ideograms and petroglyphs and Roman numerals I have
poured into you, they will come flying out of your
throat like a flock of wild geese.
Glower and glum, hallowed be our melancholic press,
breast to palm. Hear the hammer strike and imprint the
seventh letter, the hexagram of the sacred heart, the
broken lines and the steel bars, slam it onto your
shoulder blades in strident black like a spider's
corpse. Legs and bars and scars of dwelling in
purgatorial swamplands, scowling sand beleaguering the
sun, and where in all this will I find the epistles I
came for? Where in all this is there some piece of me,
of you, of us buried in all the mud and long grasses?
The sky enters my mouth each morning and my back
arches to take it in, the Xerox-whiteness bleaching my
teeth to daisies. Each night I spit it out into the
puddle-gloom, light to light to light.
Dark and light, dark and light. You carved out of a
diamond, and here lie I in onyx and granite and coal,
vomiting pearlescent obscenities into the dirt. Give
me your sulfurous El Dorado and I will stain it black,
the alleys and promenades, the balconies and colonial
architecture--the gold will disappear under my hands,
the night will raise up violet bruises. I will build
high my own fulminating El Oscuro and the wind and the
stars will rest on gentile porches of sleeping stones.
Would you dwell here with me under beams of solid yew
and fixtures of tarnished silver? Would you play house
with me and serve the tea, slice the bread for
cucumber sandwiches, ask me if I take one lump or two?
Would you drink the chimney sludge and nibble the
edges of the curtains? Would you stay and never try to
leave me alone in a parlor-tomb?
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