In the Garden of the Bridehouse

Self-Portrait When We Were Animals Called Ocean, Called Honky, Called Baby

17 Self-Portrait When We Were Animals Called Ocean, Called Honky, Called Baby We burden one we birth in none body coiled beneath water body lawless in expression to singularize we name-carve the distant At birth, they drowned on embryonic fluid, body bypassing the point between birth & breath. After resuscitation, they were isolated in a white room. Needles crowned the skull, waters breathed before breath filtered from pockets puffy beneath the skin. When released, they were diagnosed with a “surface condition.” Kept to the interior of living rooms, bedrooms, & basements, they learned to crawl beneath coffee tables, amid groves of chair legs. Once, their mother took them to the shade of a maple, blankets sheltering them in the stroller. A warm breeze tickled leaves into clucking tongues. Their father played baseball. After, their mother glimpsed through the covering. Their exposed fingers, faces were traced in veins, blistering. Their brother roared as a lion on the lawn. At dusk they joined the world’s spare-light. The year later they dressed in Sunday suit: blue vest, pants, blue tie. Their parents walked them to a playground. As she watched them crawl beneath a swing, their Tía teased, “Whose honky baby is that?” Ashblack slapped against skin. 18 The first man we loved shackled our penis in hand thumbnail tippinching mirror’s face the first woman we loved suckled our tongue tongue swallowing mirror down to moan’s trespass The sixteenth-century cobbler & German mystic Jacob Boehme practiced his craft in his home of Gorlitz, the easternmost town in present-day Germany. Imagine, exhausted, Boehme, face thin & long, reads the heretical texts of. Paracelsus by candlelight. He checks his Bible against the alchemist’s conjectures. He falls to sleep in such posture. The following morning, Boehme goes outside & comes across a pewter bowl. As he picks up the dish, the dawn rises over the horizon, & light breaks against the pewter’s curve. 19 We cut our hand @ straddles our tongue @ we echo for eidos with feet between intention & Being we consequence callused with promise flowers opposed to edict Startled, Boehme charts in shattered light the spiritual architecture of creation. Concerning the creation of the manifest universe, his depictions are an unsettling phantasmagoria of humanity’s advance out of/into grace. One illustration depicts Boehme’s Adam before Adam’s will turns to lust for the material world. The illustration’s geometrical mapping of the soul demonstrates less the Edenic origin of humankind than how language operates at the gravitational center in one cobbler’s vision of paradise. Adam is not a human body, corporeal, gendered. At the diagram’s center, a star burns amid divine fire. Adam is within & of a sphere pregnant with the synthesized alchemical symbols of water & air, the integrated feminine & masculine: @. 20 We other hunger the flower whose roots succor changeless intimacies the un of communion shaped from deeper root our betrothal in wreathes of polished bone we become dioramas we become & die or am I the pulses’ monsoon 21 My diluvium Eve animal we are we are too many skies. flesh we listen flesh we black one ribcage buries what holy becomes medallion 22 Creation we corrupt with precedence what other story could grow children ...