28 / 208
28
I’ve scattered my body
I’ve scattered my body. My knee in the Puszta. My aortas
under the sleeping vicugnas. My eyeballs under second
class seats in German trains. My cracking bones at the sites
of transit airports and random histories. Right palm in
more hands than I can recall. And my left in the pockets of
trousers taken apart by long dead moths.
When will I be ready? In the quiet night, I crept out of
myself, and while the death knell sang I ate the remains of
what I’d shed. My only food: the error of repetition. Here
are grapes of Dionysius and ripe berries, which burst into a
dismembered body in the face of terror, that of a smiling
god. I cannot forget that I’ve scattered my throat in the
Poetoviona and that oblivion is my necessary dessert after
starving.
It’s only the third stanza, but I already resist being
disgusted with the first-person narrative. But how else to
grant the body an instinctive emotional intelligence (or
rather the logic of lunacy?), which travels across time and
joins a pale cheekbone from Pontus with a crooked nose
from Ravenna with a mutilated arm from Voronezh with a
slender breastbone from Bukovina with an ear from Laz
with a rib that, in this place, joins with this place, for an
unknown, presumably never-born moment?