The Horses: New & Selected Poems

Godfighter

208 godFighTer When I was four I had my first idea four when memory flowers I can’t remember saying “I’m three” but I said “four and a half” it seemed for eons to various of Granma’s ingratiating suitors My idea was this: I’m a person too just like these people I see around me Tremendous conception It made sweet sense of the raw tumbling phenomena Not just a fountain of thusness from then on I was me bent on conceiving obsessed (abscessed) with truth Because clearly the person I was was very very special and truth was not my mother’s ‘telling the truth’ although I believed in that but the twang in another dimension God’s eye Curling back into that plasma now that my mother is dead and God’s eye sees through me 209 that fascination of me-ness I looked at my asshole in a mirror tried to see up inside thought about my soul how lucky it was amazing that my soul was in me and not in Mr. Lucas our super in a doorknob a cockroach I tried to fit the interior this momentousness I felt inside with the outside my body with other bodies my life with other lives Strange and shameful my smells my chubby body with its small tender limbs When I looked in a mirror my eyes stood still I thought I had weird frozen eyes But I also felt enormous 210 At the age of six I stopped believing in God Nay-sayer my mind rose up like a fist I loved muscles and teeth everything wild and fierce Animal over vegetable bees over wasps Indians over cowboys bulls over bullfighters I was a Godfighter fought God in the name of truth And truth had begun its morph from God’s nonexistent eye to Science There was the power Paleontology seething the oceans crawling the land with glyptodons and stegosaurs anatomy physiology astronomy Avid for its arguments and its terms I brandished them memorized and deployed them like artillery So at the beginning this new person I was turned warrior and thief of the flame • ...