Figured Dark: Poems

Discontinuous Narrative

Discontinuous Narrative My vasectomy, for instance. I choose a woman doctor, admiring William the Conqueror and his great French broadsword, but frankly, preferring the glories of the Bayeux Tapestry; the art of the women’s stitch work–– the terra cotta and blue-green threads, the olives and the goldenrod. It has endured nearly a thousand years, cut to pieces during wartime or plague and years later, reassembled, like a silent film, rescued at last from the cutting room floor. We can’t blame them because the narrative is scrambled, making another disputed text, like those misplaced scenes where the bird-flingers hurl pigeons at the fearsome hawks, or the nameless oafs are either floundering in the surf or diving for eels. Sacre bleu! She cuts so well–– the vas deferentia pulled through, right then left, the buzz of the cauterization––like a honeybee working a fleur-de-lis. Yes, my vasectomy, my midlife stumble through the blazed tail of a fateful star seems to you a child’s sparkler given a desultory wave on a hot summer night, 70 while I see it marshalling the tragic rhythms of Norse heroic poetry–– Never again my longship setting sail with lanterns fixed to its masthead, never again the brigands wielding their great swords and beflagged lances. Oh, here is The Patient’s Tale–– the leaky wineskin of my scrotum, a weekend aboard the couch, the lost-kingdom feeling that lingers for days. As in the tapestry’s last panel–– how a single horse with one terrified rider, pursued by Norman dogs, kicks and plunges forever onward: into the undyed backing, across the frayed and unmapped fens. 71 ...