After Reading Jericho Brown's Ganymede

 




After Reading Jericho Brown's 

            Ganymede


His father rides until
Grief sounds as good as the gallop
Of an animal born to carry those
Who patrol and protect our inherited
Kingdom.  When we look at myth
This way, nobody bothers saying
Rape.  I mean, don't you want God
To want you?  


If Heaven is where the poet points,

toward the terrain on an as yet

unlabeled map far off  

and between 

Promise

and 

Apology 

tell me where,

if I were 

to 

blindly lay 

my dipped nib down precisely

there and begin, where it is

you say I started?  Before or after being

touched that way?

tell me


what is the true name of the city

of my berth?  Of your berth?

Promise

or 

Apology?  


Don't try to say it

doesn't matter. I want to

know if my forced impression,

hands and knees,

will be song

or blood long before

they become

solid.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Birthday

Image
Rich Entel Cardboard Menagerie  Birthday It’s heavy to drag, this big sack of what you should have done.  And finally you can’t lift it anymore. …You never intended that it should come to this. William Stafford "It’s heavy to drag, this big sack..." Somewhere out in the world there’s a thirty three year old who took you up after you left, who was shocked like your cheek from the combustion of gunpowder breaching your skull and even your jaw, (the heavy pistol slid and you were awake the whole way only to slip first coma then no.)  And maybe it wasn’t like you’d planned it, maybe what you’d intended had nothing to do with her and maybe it was instead all the carefully folded clothes you carried from room to room when your sister ran the streets and your mother walked and walked and called down those Lynn alley drain pi...
Read more

Mill Girls

Image
Mill No. 4 Greenville, NH Mill Girls: A Sense of Direction When they shook the box, and poured out its chances, you were appointed to be happy.  Even in a prison they would give you the good cell…                                                                                 William Stafford                                                ...
Read more

Thanksgiving

Image
Thanksgiving Too late you learned to care that clean places make people want to need you, want to need to be sitting easy within little distraction: ants in the kitchen on the stove where the pilot light is plugged and hissing some as the jets sputter and tick and the knob stays at a perpetual leeward lean.   The last thing it lit was her cigarette and the gas wafted and could’ve killed everyone in the house but you opened the windows to get clean air in.   I want to come home and make it right for you, to fight your quiet despair with as simple a bottle as Windex and a box of your favorite wine, maybe a six pack of Narragansett.   These days   you spend too much time rubbing your permanently damaged hand, the spot where the lost last finger once, when it was first taken off completely, unthreaded itself like a sighing corset that's always been  too tight, lungs, stomach,  squished into the hourglass ...
Read more