- Satyr’s Flute
I was skinning a goat’s penis to prepare the dish my mother had taught me.This was not in a dream, though, with a dream’s deliciousness, the knife—a stroke of blueness—tapered the bleeding thing into a sheer bruise. One must always be careful with a penis.One must marinate it in a pool of oyster sauce with starch, sprinkle ginger juice to cleanseits urinous smell—smell of fish—ithyphallic, as Rimbaud may have said—let the residueof semen ferment with blood and the blueness into an evening sky like this: when the penisstarts weeping ceaselessly, softly at first, like a newborn, then louder, until the kitchenturns into a train station, from which the goat was brought to the nearest butchery.The penis cries like a baby, like a baby it cries for its wanting—without the mindthe penis is innocent. The penis wants its goat back. The way a child wantshis mother’s milk. And the goat, without its penis, is it anywaya goat? Half-male? Will it go crazy looking at the moon? Will it serve the Goat Kinglike a eunuch in a primeval dynasty? Or it will follow the rancid smell of deadfish, past the meadow, past the bullying woods, to reach the lampblack river and watch [End Page 74] the water flow. Watch the needles of fish sewing the stream and wishone of them was his genital. The penis in my hand is thick and emblematic, something I cannotfully fathom. A device without the service of its mind, how does that work?How, in heaven’s name, can a mind bear to lose a part of its form and stomach the loss as a thought?The thought of a penis, being nothing otherwise, is not a penis. How my mother once sawme with a boy. How she said, no. The n preceding the choir of the o is like a castrationthat severed me from her. O, am I anyway the penis my mother had once lost? I rushedback to my room, stayed a whole afternoon in front of the mirror and thought I am notbeautiful, thought she was right, no, I cannot love this boy in front of me. And wishedhe had not been born. Now I can see how the goat, disturbed by his forbidden thought, staggerstoward that river, mates with deliquescent nymphs—Hermes into Hermaphroditus,whose lilac-encased body, androgynous and gorgeous, once drowned and rosefrom the rootless water. And I see the meadow outside the kitchenis purple, an infecting pool of neutering tincture. The penis, enveloped insidemy hands, is old and tired, like a fetus curling back toward an anonymous uterus. [End Page 75]
shangyang fang comes from Chengdu, China. A Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he is author of the poetry collection Burying the Mountain.