Mosquito (2 page)

No, the crucial thing was that I couldn't say “it,” because when named directly, abstractly, “it” vanishes. The subjective world can't be rendered in a summation: “I nearly lost my life but now I am better,” Alex Lemon might say, but so what? That statement might move us in conversation, but on the page it's empty. It is the made machinery of style that manages to replicate how it feels to be alive, and that's why we
require it. “I stared into my eyelids' / Bustling magic,” Lemon writes instead, “the black / Of my hands. Oh, how darkness / Swaggered, dealt fluorescent-blurs / & the choke of the sea.” That is direct, in its way, but it's also thoroughly couched in style, a mode of speaking.

“This is how it must be to make a language,” Sandra McPherson writes in “Suspension: Junior Wells on a Small Stage in a Converted Barn,” a beautiful poem occasioned by listening to the blues musician Junior Wells. She should know. Like Wells, she makes her signature sound out of the found and the improvised, cobbling together variation and synthesis, working out an idiom that will stand in for the texture of subjectivity, a model of the perceiving and speaking self. Like the blues, the making of a poetic style is a triumph over speechlessness, a refiguring of the dynamics of power, a song—however flinty and peculiar—where none had seemed possible.

Style, unlike the defenseless body it is meant to clothe and to present, has a sort of permanence. John Berryman's poems, for instance, which must be one of the ingredients of Lemon's own wrought aesthetic, feel imbued with a sense of personality, the particular quirks of wit and bitterness. The regret and longing that fuel them are just as palpable now as they were the day the poems were written. Selfhood vanishes; style persists. As Berryman did, Lemon likes heated verbs, diction shifts (“thrummed” and “pissed”), tonal variations, a quick joke, outbursts of lyricism; he likes a poem to speed down the page. His artfully deployed stanzaic forms orchestrate our movement through his poems, arranging silences into patterns, making a music for ear and eye. He weaves a quick-shifting
fabric of figurative speech that seems to keep the poem fluid, unstable. Alex Lemon makes something larger than any narration of personal experience: a container for struggle, love, and delight—even, for the wounded and dumb body (“anonymous as graffiti”), an undeceived, adult form of hope.

 

—
Mark Doty

—Nietzsche

 

 

 

Hello friend, beautiful face
in car fire. I, the flesh wish,
am sickly wrapped in light.

 

I promise to wink the voyeur,
spike the drinks to a fine glow
& swallow. What happened
to your arms? Raw concrete,

 

bad paint? Uncapped, the bottle
can't be broken. Voice, be amazing
circling the river bottom.

 

Remember fingers rattling locks,
fingers jump-starting the zipper
spine. Filleted boy. Anesthesia
is the bottle rocket. The belly.

 

Did you hear the rain last night,
thunder? Tomorrow, I will be
afraid. I might never wake up.

An old man is playing fiddle in my head.
At least that's what the doctor says,
pointing, as he holds my MRI to the light.

 

He must be eating the same hot dogs
my nephew microwaves. My nephew sees
Bob the Builder everywhere—smiling

 

in sauerkraut, sawing in the drifting sky.
Afternoons he names me Bob, knocks
my knee with a plastic hammer. I'm half-

 

naked, shivery with chicken skin,
napkin-gowned. But I don't laugh
because I think the veined cobweb

 

looks like Abe Lincoln's profile on the penny.
So let's pretend I'm not sick at all.
I'm filled with golden tumors—

 

love for the nurse who feeds me
to the machine. The machine worse
than any death—the powerlessness
of a shaved & strapped-down body.
Even in purgatory you can wear earrings
& though the music might crack a spine,

 

at least in that torture, the tears from your arm's
needle marks are mouth-wateringly sweet.

The best part of brain surgery isn't the shining
staples that keep it all in, the ways

 

fingers and tongues will find the scar.
It's not wheelchair rides through maple leaves,

 

sunlight warming a bruise as I fumble
peeling an orange. Nor is it the gentle tug

 

of a nurse reminding muscles—bend, stretch
and flex. The sweetest ingredient—

 

the best part is the cutting. Hollow space
that longs to be filled with what little I have.

 

The first bite, cold fruit. Bedridden, I weigh
my glass eye in a wrinkle-mapped hand.

Open my mouth & watch the mouse-trapped shake,
the maggot-house-meat
splayed before dogs—I am
that
scab
peeled from the butcher's midnight eyes.
Persistent scalpel—I will thorn soft
these ill-illuminated pleasures.
The mouth whips. The mouth
whips itself clean with wind.

I knife your words into trees & repeat them backwards
to feel, thieve ear to breast
like a cheat. Today I hunger

 

for the smallest sheen, hunger for leaves backboning
a chain-link fence.
A shattered-foot ballerina, I cross
pavement split-
lipped, slopping my ruby hooves. Birthing children
piece by piece, I live by fortune
cookies, blizzards & scars.

Incantation mumbling in the cutting
room, I watch hooks blossom

 

with corrugated beef—imagine the chunk
they towed from the sawed-bone bowl

 

of my skull. At night, I swallow
thousands of fists—gasp when lightning

 

splinters winter sky. Every splitting
rib cage whispers—
Now, goddamn it.

 

The morning saw squeals
through rock-hard chickens

 

as I scribble with the tip
of a blade. What is left—

 

savor child dog marrow—
The body's secrets should be
anonymous as graffiti
in bathroom stalls, brilliant

 

as sun-chromed snow. Today,
I see like a drowned man, bait whirling

 

radiant as stars in a pierced sky,
sea-grass bowing to greet.

It would take jackhammers
to find that other-self. Saw-shrieks,

 

elegies for taste—whiplash,
moan & scald. This body

 

is something Giacometti
sculpted: wax & molten steel,

 

the die-cast of night's necessities.
Smaller, I beg you, smaller.

 

For fear my outline is neither
live nor dead, air dances electric

 

with broken ghosts. Cheeks
absent of color: lip after the bite.

Sticky in autumn's poplar, the voyeur,
who may or may not be me, sketches
the leaf's cursive fall. Grasshoppers sleep

 

in amber. This could be feeling: not good,
but at least not hurt. I need spells & voodoo
to stop time. Close my eyes—bring me
willing things, orphans waiting open-armed
for needles, gravel-floored cellars & spiders
the size of fists. Underwater, you cannot hear

 

my favorite song: a mouth whispering
half my name, all the sheets turned down.

—
after Mark Conway

 

Please me when I say take it
For a ride—make it a place others
Might understand. Let me explain—

 

A prairie puzzled apart by lightning
For example, the oak vamping de-limbed
In winter, or how each pair of tennis shoes is

 

Unwound from the power line. But none of this
Shines like a rain of thumbtacks. For a mouth
Open is no different than frostbite or a bucket of bolts

 

Slopping into the sun's bath. It is a barking animal
But do not say dog. I will check for the baby
Beneath my dress. Now, we have highways

 

& nothing seems far enough away. The way
Of holy eyes—morning & knife-in-the-box
That act of misunderstanding, which is

 

Much more casual than a glass dusted in sunlight
& because we call it casual, or a glass in sunlight
It will not break or bleed. This is fundamental

 

& nothing came before. I adore you the blizzard
That going blank, that's fine. A raccoon
Awake & thief-mouthed in the dumpster

 

The half-chewed chicken bone is a truth
That little victim is suffer everything & joy

You have to admit, pushing my wheelchair
was better than painting my dead lips.

 

Maybe
, the surgeon said, caressing my head
like a hurricane. I wished I was a tan girl, hands

 

overflowing with perfect shells. You needn't
ask, Mother, I forgive you. Stop nailing yourself to trees.

 

Pray my child never has to fall asleep cold,
waiting to be cut by strangers. Give them nothing

 

of mine, I'll tell them before they shake
a heart to life in a test tube. Science:

 

make it red hair, brown eyes,
& by the way, Mother, the market

 

where we cried biting apples,
Whole
Foods
—they don't let me in there anymore.

I've hummed it so many times I can't feel
the right side of my face & now

 

I'd rather be gagged with guitar strings
& dragged behind a hot rod than sit

 

deadlog in a wheelchair. How many times
will you push a needle into my thigh

 

before something more brilliant
wakes? O, whistling skin of a pierced

 

& patched body. I stumble through life
like a kicked dog. How many have dropped

 

wishes in my skull? Dipped,
then pressed wet-tipped fingers

 

to their lips? When the body quakes
& pink bubbles crawl lips, push

 

the chest down—squeeze & plunge the knife
so the tongue is frozen & bit.

The hospital's bell-throat moans
as my roommate dies. Remembering

 

where the goodbye letters were hidden,
the scarred clatter spoons in the hall.

 

Doctors gulp, click their teeth—
hum when skin accepts the cutting.

 

Tomorrow my head opens. If I am still
here, someone let me know what I am.