Poems for Infidels

The Miraculous Influence

68 The Miraculous Influence A myth of inspiration The imaginary zoologist my interior rake is fond of saying if he led a thirsty beast to water and it didn’t drink he’d cut its head off. People and animals take him seriously. 1 He appeared one morning among giant ferns and owl’s clover, writhing upright— a lyrical and nervous snake. 1 My breasts are blue where he abuses them—while I lacerate the lettuce for our venison dinner. 1 (The woman with tiny claws— the woman with mushroom eyes— the wearer of boar bones the bellydancer at that New Age place— they too lovingly do his beekeeping.) 69 1 Some days he flies up from the ground behind me. Then a sound escapes me like the one that tender Leda made. 1 (Narrow cruel enchanted fellow irrefutable this amphibian infatuation.) 1 Once he really zeroed in on what was killing me but didn’t destroy it saying Well it’s just a little egg your death. Who else would have been so delicate? 1 Tonight I’ll wear my eel-skin skirt with silver fish-belt. He’ll mistake me for a river— then I’ll trap him in the thick black honeycombs of my beautiful thighs. 1 70 I tell him about the monkey villages of starlight in the trees. That all passions are magnetic. That the women in my family, we age incredibly sexily. I say: You are the splendor which gets odder by the day. He tells me to take off my clothes and get on the dissection table. 1 Our happiness is a labyrinth of caged ferocities. Why should we ponder the parable of the birth certificates together? (Who is by whom? What is from what?) Our sadness manifests itself in the tribe of snow-white rabbits hunkering down in the corners of my being-alive. Sometimes they wave so bravely at us, just like Rose Queens— 1 71 One day for Arthur Rimbaud’s sake and for no other reason, soul-mate, I’ll be ending this. Okay he’ll say but won’t the local beavers all eat cake—? The whole race is a poet that writes down the eccentric propositions of its fate. ...