Captain Midnight in the Undergrowth, and: Lesson in Perspective

Captain Midnight in the Undergrowth

I am all dressed up in tattered moonlight and shadow,
I have smeared my face with boot polish. G.I. Joe in mask
and animal skin, I have an assassin's claws, a rapist's

wooden dick. This evening Captain Midnight is looking
for some action. Watch out, Red Ridinghood, trick-
or-treating through suburban neighborhoods, the rain-wet

leaves glitter like my dentures, all the better to snap
at your ankles. And it was always so. The wicked uncle,
the brutal brother, the faceless father gibbering on his

high throne, even the handsome husband prowling
through dark alleys for a touch of tit or thigh. The tribe
calls me Nkisi and Nkondi. They have driven iron nails

into my chest. I bristle like a boar, I hook on like a burr.
I eat the wives and children of my enemies. Tyger,
tyger. Bully-boy. Mister Nightmare. It's a man thing.

We can't help it. We love it. We have always loved it.
We come into the fairytale world as a fist, a knife, a gun.
Hansel in lederhosen, Gretel in white panties - they see only

a movement, a flash from the bits of mirror over my eyes.
I am Tyger, Zagreus, the thunder-and-lightning man.
I crouch in my father's scrotum waiting to be born again.

Lesson in Perspective

Entrava ella, fragrante,
mi cadea fra le braccia.
O! dolci baci, o languide carezze! . . .
Svani per sempre il sogno mio d'amore . . .

—Tosca

Albrecht Dürer gets the measure of things,
the lay of the land, the news in brief.
His stylus scouts the hinterland

of a map blank but for lines
of latitude and longitude.
To keep his viewpoint right
he steadies his nose against the tip

of a desk-top obelisk, his eyes
narrowed on her raised knees.
Targeting a central vanishing point,

he jots the scribbled crotch.
Between his gaze and the precipitous
shins he has rigged a frame of wires,
a cage of squares, plotting

the vectors of her pillowy curves.
We call her "model." Supine
with raised knees. Tight chignon.

White bread of breasts and belly,
which, fixed on his spike,
he does not see. "Artist and model."
I watch them through a different grid,

describing his hooked profile
framed by a window: the stoneware
jug, the majolica pot, the bush

of basil, the toy merchant ship
on the spread page of the sea.
And I see her lift from the horizon
like a coming storm, a thunderhead

crackling with potential voltage.
I want to see him zapped,
his tight coordinates a ragged web,

his obelisk a ruin. We cannot,
however, change a thing. Voyeur
or cartographer, we have our own
perspectives. We keep our distances,

eyeing our warped reflection -
twitching, foreshortened -
in the darkened tv screen.