Sitting Isohydric Meditation
- Sitting Isohydric Meditation
weather is water is one way to think
about the season seizing the street tree
another drought year measured in questions
I asked the nurses who gently strapped me
to the clang & throb inside the passing
time the MRI ground into windows
the doctor looked through to see my future
I sit on the couch & watch the sparrows
on the branches pant & puff their feathers
a sort of solstice truce with the dry heat
moving scorch from edge to stem on each leaf
the heat’s so quiet it’s a kind of pain [End Page 61]
nothing seems to soothe not even his damp
armpit & its scent of moss soaked with rain
woody sweet dear bacterial earth
mouth my mouth opens onto & into
his skin confusing outside inside me
when we fuck we go deep mammal all fur
& genital scent in my beard a soak
of pheromones taut swollen erectile
tissue & the swoon of adrenaline
a chemical world that feels insular
but is immersed in stimulus the way
a magnetic field held my prone body
whose protons aligned their axes & flipped
their spins to allow radio waves
through flesh made newly resonant I felt [End Page 62]
removed from the world & cocooned in sound
while the protons slowed & their spins flipped back
radio signals that rendered image
vertebral detail so precise it hurt
to look at the bones as the doctor talked
drought’s about being porous & storing
water if you can’t travel to get it
so some tree species close their stomata
& wait for water the way maples do
dying slowly from edges to center
as a stress response it’s a real gamble
to shut yourself up inside of yourself
if I could I would stay as open as
his face when I sit on his cock & he
holds my hips & tilts himself up deeper [End Page 63]
injury insists it remain hidden
& grows its quota of pain from the bones
the doctor showed me calcifications
white as dry lichen leaching life from
a lip of granite how to keep going
into the quotient of future the bones
divide inside me the incurable
instance a given faultless or at fault
I remain hidden how to keep going [End Page 64]
Brian Teare is the author of five books, most recently Companion Grasses (Omnidawn, 2013), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Ahsahta, 2015). His sixth book, Doomstead Days, will be out from Nightboat Books in 2019. His honors include Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle Awards, and fellowships from the NEA, the Pew Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. An Associate Professor at Temple University, he lives in South Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
