A Boy Steps Into the Water, and: Bottleglass, and: Tower of Babel
- A Boy Steps Into the Water, and: Bottleglass, and: Tower of Babel
boy, boyhood, poetry
animals, bottle, glass, poetry
babel, Adam, death, God, poetry
A Boy Steps Into the Water
and of course he's beautifulgoosebumps over his ribslike tiny fists under a thin sheet the sheetall mudwet and taste of walnut
and of course I'm afraid of himof the way keeping him a secret will make himinevitable I will do anything to avoidgetting carried away sleep nightly with coins
over my eyes set fire to an entirezodiac mecca is a mothchewing holes in a shirt I leftat a lover's house a body loudly
consumes days and awaits the slowfibrillation of its heart a lightning rodsits in silence until finally the stormnow the boy is scooping up minnows
and swallowing them like a heronI'm done trying to make senseof any of this no one will believe anythingthat comes out a mouth like mine [End Page 166]
Bottleglass
go ahead tread on mesee if I care I am alreadyunhuggable as a cactusand too big to fit on anylap keep your excusesshort or better yet keepthem to yourself anyanimal you live with willeventually eat you orat least want to evenbirds especially birdsit's not betrayal if they'rehungry or verybored I am hot asbottleglass pulled froma fire my liver can'thandle Tylenol any feveris like a needle prickingthrough my pupils intomy brain I am boilingdown to broth you arefull of spermicide andthe guilt of theconqueror tell mewhat that feels like usingonly verbs then carvemy initials into yourhalo watch medisappear in luxurylike a beautiful name-less planet with threemoons and a dead sun [End Page 167]
Tower of Babel
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563
My reward for waking: close walls and limestone dust, spitevaporating from my tongue. First
I count and recount my toes, throw out grain for the carp, snatch a femur
from the waterwheel (each is a small mercy). Then,splitting cedar for the winches,
building cages and stacking them so high they wobble in the wind. One man owns
all this land. One tongue, all these men. How long will it takefor the water to lap away
the shore? For us to become fat with boar and clover honey? A heartblink and I could be popped
from the face of the world like the king's glimmering glass eyeset nightly in a jar of pear wine
and pink salt. Man's soul has been divided since Adam. In our toil we stitch the two parts together, [End Page 168]
making them pious and unafraid. Still, I confess to not knowing whereI belong. When I dream, I dream
of a crystal lute, its sound unspooling into me like hot black flowers burning through a corpse.
What it means: I must bear this living, pass stone up laddersand raise the king's flag.
Each day I dazzle the Lord with my labor. Before long, I will have a great bed in the sky. [End Page 169]
Kaveh Akbar is the founding editor of Divedapper. His poems appear or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, the American Poetry Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. His debut full-length collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf will be published by Alice James in September 2017; he is also the author of the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry, 2017). The recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, and is a visiting professor of poetry in the Purdue University MFA program.
