PARTIAL SELF-PORTRAIT AS LYCURGUS, THE SPARTAN LAWGIVER ON WHOSE VERY EXISTENCE THE
EXPERTS CANNOT AGREE
What present ever fully feels triumphant?
It’s been years since I’ve touched a weapon
thicker than my breath. Not yet totally
doddering in a sweaty salmon sash,
most days the furthest I can get from
abstraction is recalling the taste of dirt
in my mouth the day my mother bent
me to the earth and held me there until
I had to breathe it. Lessons are rarely so
clean. Now I treat everyone like her
children. I tell them I have long imagined
my coming redundancy. Can they theirs?
I see it in everything: the beehives we fling
upon our opponents’ ranks, milk pots,
flaming piles of leaves, the infant
skulls we collect, displaying their two
eager rows of teeth. Talking about it
is useless, and the only preparation. Here,
in this tent that reeks of heat, its apex
packed with the gossip of moth wings,
after the living talk dies in the manner
of everything, I lie on one side and accept that
I have done enough to sleep in nothing
but thick circles of salt; or, if not exactly
sleep, close my eyes and listen, grateful,
to the leather gently creaking as I breathe.
Leather, salt, the wind whistling through
these tarps and whittled cedar beams:
I surround myself with such spare things.
Maybe this is why I despise my dreams.
This morning, toward the rock
on which I sat tearing loose the skin
of a small orange for my child to eat,
a snake approached, thick and gray and cold
looking. It was quiet, so I spoke to it.
It stilled. It listened. It did not speak,
so I wasn’t sure whether I was dreaming,
since in my dreams a snake would speak;
even a beam of light would speak
in my dreams, darkly, improbably, it would
weep like my child when they cannot
sleep, so starts listing things to calm
their mind: first friends, then pets, then
the creatures whose flesh our conditions
have dictated that we eat, fish and cow
and duck and sheep, yes, but then
gerbil, rabbit, donkey, swan, and dog,
their mouth increasingly undone
by shaping the names of each, until
all it does is breathe and weep. It is
a tenderness the world and I will see
them defeat. Once in a dream I watched
a dove go mad trying to free a worm
from the ground. When the wolf came
and ate the dove and the worm, it ate
the madness too. It saw everything
tainted with a relentless purple resin.
When the wolf came into my tent,
it didn’t matter what words it howled
at me, bundle, moonlight, revel, jewel;
regret was all it could convey. But
this snake would not speak. The way
it lay there, so still and looking up at me,
it was sweet. I was dreaming. I knew it.
I had to be. So I awoke and slew it.
I had not touched a weapon in years.
But I slew the snake. In the dark
I sat up and stabbed it back to nothing.
When my mind returned to me
and I found nothing in the surrounding
salt, I listened, first, to that nothing—
and then, from across the tent, to the soft
whimper of your dreams. It was dark.
The hour had yet to come. When it does,
child, blame your life of blood on me.
IN YOUR HEART THERE IS A MUSEUM OF BONSAI TREES
where I have been brought on
as the night watchman
who cannot keep his clumsy
if sincere hands off things.
First from panic and then from habit
each twig my curiosity breaks off
I sneak home in my pocket
and with rat teeth, twine, and glue
fashion them into rudimentary figures
engaged in scenes of charm and courtesy.
During the daytime
hours I am known to sleep through,
the children who hound
the stairwells of this building
tiptoe past my broken, lockless
door to see what I have done
for them. I keep my eyes shut.
I snore in terse and jagged stripes.
I hope it makes their trespass worth it.
Sometimes they take off
with the figures they most adore
and I let them, wanting
as little as I can make of myself
to hamper their delight.