Jacob's Captors

Of Jacob's capture I remember little.
I was wedged deep in the family.
At night I dragged myself to the window:
a southern hemisphere sprayed with the shavings of stars.
A kitten slept coiled beside my head.
Roosters whistled me from labyrinths of sleep.
Morning blossomed in geranium flare.
Childhood had no outlines—
it floated in washes of color brushed to my temples.

What pleasure did Jacob ever pluck from life?
He had the wan visage of a keeper of nocturnal vigils,
the nervous hands of one accustomed to shielding his face
from the onslaught of vegetation that rioted
in thick haze following the rainy season that year,
a haze pierced occasionally by sunshards peeled
from that inexhaustible solar fruit to which father
tilted his face during pauses in his sluggish labor.
Perhaps Jacob sensed the approach of his captors
from a great distance, stemming back to infancy,
when the petals of his skull sealed the vibrant
tumescence of his brain. He would chew nervously
on the cuffs of his church robe, and spin about
to look behind him, as if he heard the whirling thyrsus
of a Maenad pursuing him through our vast house,
where gloomy hallways hung with tapestries opened
suddenly into drawing rooms in which mingled
pipe smoke, laughter, the clinking of cheap jewelry.

I remember his scream at the sight of some blood
sausages mother had left boiling on the stove.

When other children were disappearing into thickets,
behind garages in which jeeps were rusting,
into the noxious tangle of thistle flanking a boathouse,
to explore the mysterious rites of sex, where was Jacob?
From what lips did he sip the honey of tenderness?
His hair thinned. His vital juices were sucked from him
through an invisible straw by a mouth no one but he sensed.

O those late autumn dusks,
the forest parks a fiery palimpsest of decay—
we rubbed aloe on his skin and villagers came
and offered the few provisions they could.

Jacob, by what circuitous paths did they come for you,
trudging the inroads of coppery afternoons?
Was the nightly rustling of the acacia outside your window
a harbinger of that doom folded for you in the unused pockets
of existence? You were confined like a mammal
from another era limping through a musty terrarium.
I had some of you in me, for why else
would we clasp hands beneath the sheets when
the airships chopped the misty skies beyond our reckoning,
and why else were the nerves sparking in our hands calmed
by the flourishing crowns of oak lining the esplanade?
Jacob, they got you as your expression said they would,
your life pointing like an arrow toward your death.

The Dead Sea

They were all face down.
They were still. Some had their arms
flung out as if to embrace the earth.
Some had their arms held stiffly at their sides—
they looked like caterpillars tensed
in the expectation of transformation.
But no chrysalis formed in night air.
Others had hands bound behind them.
They all looked thrown overboard,
sunk to the bottom of a Lake Baikal
that had drained and exposed its deposits.
I expected to see an anchor half-buried.
They were all handsome men—
you didn't have to see their faces to know it.
They were all face down.
Their bodies attested to years of physical exertion,
a plentiful diet of beef and greens.
They had not yet begun to swell.
Their tunics and belts still clung to them
faithfully, like leaves on felled trees.
Their legs had been torn open,
the tendons yanked out.
Birds gathered. Birds swooped from forests and
from the archaic parapets of blasted villas,
untended arcades where mulberry and buckthorn
burgeoned unchecked across unpeopled paths.
I was there to scare the birds off.
Until when?
I paced around the field and spoke,
and when my energy waned, I sat
and blew into a Jew's harp I'd plucked
from one of their pockets.
When a convoy passed
I too lay face down.

Hospital

I was inside when the outside intruded.
A cowbell clanged
from fence-lined bluish acres.
Mother's face was blurred with fatigue.
She said god is anything that can't be
pinned down. A man with no Adam's apple
led us to where the stillborn child was buried
between the forks of a creek. A strange
red mushroom grew there—it cured us.
For a time. Time ground us slowly.

How many patients can we take in?
Where is the hospital among the groves
and roads, between the towers and plains,
churning with what we've made? There.
There they tossed me from the white and
wrapped me in the red. There
fluids have a number and before
a doctor cuts a bone he checks his teeth
in the sheen of his saw. I saw the food

delivered in sacks. From the stacks
the smoke spilled and smelled
like a dying sea. Through a grate
I saw convalescent hands clapping
to A Mossy Home Among the Pines.
I saw people who didn't work,
who wanted things put inside them,
leashed to their bags of blood. I too
came slumping from those doors
in search of a better building. Now

I have little to say.
I fold my maps and wish myself away
to a cave in which to duck the zodiac fires.


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