Death Style 8.17.20
Leonard Cohen; Clytemnestra
Surely I am evading my responsibilities:
hiding out in the backyard, choosing to believe
my teens are working/learning when they are
pursuing their own privacy on the Internet
like nymphs gathering blooms in a bright field above a seam
a bird-eye ticks at the bottom of the well
and won’t give back even light
it wants to blink
wants to rub its own eye
and go to sleep
in the seam of itself
I want something pulled out of me
like a maiden witched back up out of the well
or maybe i want
to slit and blink at the bottom of it
let the heir tumble into me
live forever there
dead and romantic
well that’s one way to do it
become a holy well
in the holy see
in the middle of the night
in the middle of the night
we watch 8mm films about the island of hydra
an island named for water
as if to hide itself in its name
in its own open eye
there Leonard and Marianne swim and swim
as if the water itself
is the island of hydra
eviscerating itself
in clear alcohol
ouzo and ozone
i need that operation
to take the ache out
a useless instrument left there by a god
a brass instrument with a knot in its middle
ancient huntresses went around in holy girdles
ancient matrons whipped out their breasts
in a fervor, ripped up their sons
with their seamrippers
snip snip went the seam
between temperance, intemperance
they invented tragedy
then hurled the whole world through it
a periphery perforated by
absurdity and calamity
like funeral games performed for a slain infant
where the victor wins a crown of celery
If you are going to wear a crown, it should be made of something
ridiculous, that bobs
I take this lesson to heart
I take this lesson to heart
when I imagine we meet at the bottom of the sea
and you are something pollen-like and flourishing in the nitrogen seams
and I grub around with comically distended jaws
dismayed by so much gravity and
bearing a fleshy bauble pedunculating from my brow
like the watchfire on Mount Arachne
in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon
lit up second-to-last
before the bad news comes crashing home
to run the murder-bath
as like a jerk
I jerk about in the birdbath
trying to focus the world’s image
in each of my four fovea
as time flies by on jerk’s wings
and my alarm clock brain keeps slotting, slotting
through all the devotional hours of the day
I have to jerk my head to one side
I have to slit my eyes
I have to look at it
sidewise
like a pencil rolling under the desk
byebye
when I receive a phonecall
from a gentleman named Spam Risk
who resides in Black Eddy, Pennsylvania
I do not answer it.
