Love in the Time of War

(for Wei-ch'in Lin)

 

Reactions of skin to the Cultural

Revolution.  Six years of exhaustive

industry:  grenades and a glimpse of wild

duck wings.  My fingerprints shaping the class

of our motorcycle contingent.  He

laughed in the grass at the Peach Blossom

Memorial, touching the gold laments

of flowers. Holding me, we lingered

 

with a renaissance on our hands. Sliding

ourselves into the cool wound of the sky.

Luminous as bullets. Hair polished

solid with sweat.  Our bare metal humming.

Afterwards, letting the world bend to us

in a forbidden crescent of prayer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meditation on Peace

 

Turbulent, in animal months, brooding,

the male secretes his necessary school,

 

multi-fold, as if to obliterate

this war, standardized.  Who'll consider

 

the sexual anthropology of

those who came to coo on the final earth?

 

Who'll be offered flight, or just relief,

the milky succor rolled into shape,

 

a couple nesting safe in their hunger,

transparent of touch, each culmination

 

imparting ritual sums and symbols,

a migration of souls after the bomb?

 

 

 

 

 

Stopped Dead

(for Aaron Brown)

 

Yowl like a baby thrown into the air

over the guardrail.  The insurance will

make someone a millionaire.  I stopped

dead.  My soul's transparent map suddenly

folding away in the glove compartment.

And here I am: beside the factory.

Windscreen glass smashed in my ribs.  Icy

knives visited by blood, promptly alive,

 

dripping off somewhere.  Listen, pretty boy,

take your foot off the clutch.  Pop the lap belt,

whoever you are.  Reborn inside this

violence.  On the sweet rails of wreckage,

as red pearls stream by.  One indicator

still blinking wet like a blackened eye.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thalidomide

 

You both agreed a heart: indelible

bud, safely gloved in crush-proof buckskin,

 

and protected by its dark arteries.

Blood-call of the night carpenter: this space

 

deficient of love.  Red monstrosity

dragging its veins, appalling, half-brained,

 

an unmasked moon.  Its screech and two eyes

dripping with spit.  Lopped knuckles of

 

relationship nursed into person.

A birth photo slips from a dim mirror.

 

The image aborts absolving itself.

The dappled fruit of indifference.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Rabbit Catcher

 

The spoon mouth alive with poppy oil.

A constant sliding of flames, smoke blown like

hair of the dead.  How we perched up high

on a tight wire.  The syringe, its clear

wall of intent, the dull plug of its tongue,

and blood tearing blindly, unreeling to

worship that little prick.  Feel the thick glass

handle hit the vein hollow like fortune.

 

A space to get into.  Hot shrieks next to

the cooking pan.  Eyes almost closed on

the simmering passage to the math of

injection: zeroes set intimately

in this quick business.  The spike of unction,

its deep vacancy, a rabbit warren.

 

Editor's Note:  All of these poems are cut-ups of "New Yorker" or Sylvia Plath's poems.  Demcak uses a variation of the William S. Burroughs and Brion Gyson technique supplemented by the French Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) method.

A lecture by Andrew Demcak on this compelling approach can be heard here.