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į![]()
NATURAL HISTORY
I wanted to see Comanche,
so you took me in the snow,
to the dusty small-town museum.
You said it had once been fine,
glamorous, even, and the shaggy
Kodiak in the Americas could light
the scene with his teeth. Now
the sky is faded white, water-
stained, paint flakes on the heads
of bobcats and badgers, someoneās
tusk fell in the dried-up river,
thereās dryrot in the buffalo herd.
Past the desert and beyond
the snowy waste and boreal forest,
in a small black-painted hallway,
thereās one glass cube, and in it,
Comanche. He is alone in the cube.
He is not well lit. They have him raised
to a low hover. His hooves dusty
like he just ran in, his coat a claybank shine.
Still saddled and alert, with the kindest eyes.
A man in a trenchcoat shuffles in,
presses himself against the wall
like a moth. I was tired from standing.
My leg hurt. I briefly thought of crying.
I thought of smashing the glass
with a kick, riding Comanche out.
I thought of grabbing your hand,
pulling you into the flat black
paint and kissing you, I thought of
pouring my blood into your blood,
of becoming daylight inside you, of you
becoming the prairie under me, or
above. Of golden grass, of the perfect
darkness behind Comanche,
of the hands that built a wood frame,
cured his hide, stretched it over, and whether
they could recall in their bones what it is
to gallop, flat out, into the streamingā
I thought I wanted to see Comanche
but that was not what I wanted, and
that man was there, in the trenchcoat,
and my shot leg throbbed and I stayed
what I was. A stuffed thing.
I couldnāt meet your eyes, only
Comancheās. Which had been
for a hundred years and more, and
continued to be, made out of glass.
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THE WORD AGAIN
My friend once didnāt thank me
for pointing out five poems in his sheaf
where heād used the word pith. That book
about the never-breaking branchā
dark, in every poem, or nearly. Today
I saw bear in mine all over. One with
actual bears, or at least people
resembling bears, galumphing
down the street, and rivers
that bear you up, and then the bearers,
human, of a coffin, but nothing about
what anyone can bear or not bear, nothing
about what can be borne, though there is
one poem skeleton called āRainbears,ā
which are not real and never were.
Shaggyblue, skywater soaked, nothing un-
bearable to them, no sorrow, no rage,
they would be strong as gods.
I was this kind of bear or god, nothing
couldnāt be borne, I thought.
No insult, no grief, no binding
lash. When everyone went indoors,
I was dripping fog in the field,
endlessly strong, endlessly crushed. But Iām not,
now, any kind of shabby martyr.
There are unbearable things.
Most things are unbearable.
Being inside when I want to be outside,
interminable fear of doing or saying
the wrong thing, disdain, modernist couches,
many people, not being able to say this isā
when it isāunbearable.
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AGAINST A DWARF
[translated from the Old English]
Against a dwarf one should take seven little wafers, like those for offering,
and write these names on each wafer:
Maximanius, Malchus, Iohannes, Martimanius, Dionisius,
Constantinus, Serafion.
Then in turn one must sing the spell
that is spoken hereafter. One shall sing, first in
the left ear, then in the right ear, then above that manās
head. And then bring a virgin and hang it around
her neck, and do this for thre...
