The Trailhead. Kerri Webster
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bore their dirty traffic into pine trees.
God says, You cling to deixis
like a life raft. Here, you say. Now,
you say. All winter, you say, like it means
something, days crossed off your compulsive
calendar, wind tied to your wrist
like a pet. This dumb hunger for fixity!
I made your cells to shed, says God.
She bites her lip till it bleeds.
Who wouldn’t immanentize the eschaton
if they could, build heaven on earth
in the backyard? She wouldn’t, is who.
Day a slit-throated ewe.
To ground herself, she strips berries
from juniper bushes.
Well, says God, Alexander the Great
dyed his hair saffron. We are all
made fools in this world.
HILL WALK
Come let us poison all the honeybees for we
are in world’s dotage—insensible—and
seeing things: spectral migrations; unholy
gyres; squid that light up; a yew tree struck
by lightning, which must mean something;
a back lashed until it suppurates and comes apart
like what paper the wasps spit out; a blinded man
held in a cell for years for
what, for what—
and the river slivers the dark.
And someone says, Cast him out at gates and let him
smell his way to Dover;
and centuries pass; and then
someone says it again; and if
we are not cruel, perhaps it is only
because we are too tired to be cruel.
I dream hounds that bite my belly, teeth
to the softest skin. My needs grow simple
until nothing of me needs
redacting. I walk the hills by night;
I want to put them in my mouth.
There is an hour at which
the foothills silver—
if there are snakes, they are for sleeping.
I go where called.
And cry these dreadful summoners grace?
There is an hour at which all manner of dark
miracles appear—
like, foxes; or, shame; or,
the soldier’s legs leave his body
and walk on by me;
or, strips of skin from off the man’s back
half a world away
fly by my face
as ash—
and all birds are ghosts of the bird
I once drowned in a paper cup
after the cat tore it open but
it kept breathing. Tonight the gulch
eats tire rims and colored pencils, the gulch
eats foxes, and pulses
as we sleep, and as we sleep
the appetites continue, and what we harm
smells its way towards us.
HULLS GULCH
Months from any tree becoming remotely fragrant yet one cannot remain in bed. What if, by the time things forsythia, we no longer recognize the flora, believe it’s some sort of apocalypse, are possibly afraid? The pall clots, a sharpness at the temples. The sky pretends at simple. I have no quarrel with figments. Night garden, whetstone, small alien ships of seedpods tangled on the barbed wire. Here is the skull of the hummingbird on a chain around my neck. Let us pretend it’s fleshed, the chain a leash; let us be sad souls who keep bones on silver threads. In the theater, the couple in the next row masturbated each other in the dark, dove noises as the city burned. After, I drove into the hills, past the reedy underbrush that pretends at fire. I hiked on; the pall did not dissolve, though I felt a little better, thank you.
Here the trailhead; here the sagebrush; here the creek, the glass house on the cliff, the telephone wires, the dust kicked up so that I am never without my vials of eye drops—“thinking for hours together of having the knife she gave me put in a silver-case—the hair in a Locket—and the Pocket Book in a gold net”—the absences tangible as hummingbird skulls. Having come to the trailhead, I crave a speechless place caught up in a gold net.
Grit in my teeth and the sky about to tear, I peer into the cleft two boulders make. Eye to the dark, I hear impossible water. I am learning to allow for visions. The cliffs give up a sound like howling, which merges with actual howling to become a system of enormous potential. A lightninged thicket; a road sliced out of winter; a tooth buried in the bark of a tree; a bowl of lathed yew; a ewe split like a peach but still bleating. I walk and walk. Like a jellyfish or annunciation, the heliodore-yellow underlying everything shimmers, is gone.
Often when I wake the furniture’s slightly haloed, sleeping pill screwing with the visual cortex, a pleasant holiness. I believe he went home with her smell on his fingers; I believe that on the trail are many handsome dogs. The acedia hums and hums. Soon, excess and magnolia, snow in the mountains moving toward us as runoff, great volumes of water pulled into the valley, swans on the riverbank drinking that snow. I will sit by the trail until my head stops hurting. I will try not to be afraid.
THE NIGHT GROVE
The torturer wants to know
how one minute blood, one minute
snow. She wants the windows
closed. The draft. Light breaks
across his back.
She lets the torturer put his head in her hands.
Tells him about Flanders,
the speaking dead.
We are the Dead, they say.
Where snow falls
in the taxonomy of the greater and lesser
desires: it falls on the taxonomy. On the money
and on the torso. On the fur.
She tells the torturer:
first, for practice, they bayonetted
straw men. Missing their villages, winter
descending. And then
the soft flesh of stomachs
attached to bodies
tied to trees.
He says,
that is a very ancient story.
She says, Simon Peter stirred the fire. There
in his animal body.
Yes, he says. Breath milk-warm
on