DEAR BEAST LOVELINESS: POEMS OF THE BODY

BY TIM J. MYERS

BLAZEVOX[BOOKS] Buffalo, New York

DEAR BEAST LOVELINESS: POEMS OF THE BODY By Tim J. Myers Copyright 2013 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza Cover art: 'Birth-Ascension' by Tim J. Myers First Edition ISBN: 978-1-60964-123-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2012920899 BlazeVOX [books] 76 Inwood Place Buffalo, NY 14209 Editor@blazevox.org

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Portrait of Anyone

At first no more than microscopic pearl descending on dark waters through strange passageways deep in a woman's body, there to be met by ecstatic crowding messengers each bearing a kind of self-at first no more than pale sun surrounded by insistent burrowing stars: This is egg and sperm. This is one of us. And then: eyes looking around, maybe brown, maybe blue flecked with gold, two small round skies that see. If you remove a cell from a living heart, the cell will continue to beat. And me with this tree in my chest that breathes my life, this blood-fountain at my center, its innumerable rivers flowing to distant countries all within-and then the meat that thinks, that dreams of roses here behind my eyes. Exactly what stupendous inaccessible secret of mortality are we?

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Hymn to Carbon

Oh you run dancing through all my cells! spinning yourself out in this vast strict flowing of miracles that I am-oh Simple-made-many, wild Intricate, pure and prime as the number one, yet multiple! Naming myself I number blood, bones, flesh, heart, mind-but you run deeper than these, far deeper in all that I am or do, root of the roots of myself and of selves uncountable. You are the inconceivable Brahman down in my joy at love-making, you the seminal smoke of my anger, core of my reverence, power beneath my muscles as they thrill to their special electricity, beneath my kindness, my memory of words or faces, my waking, my sleep, there at the very tick of the voicelessness saying Me. I'll offer you prayers, wine, flowers, as from existence itself you draw out such music as is my being, such billion inwoven melodies, bonding, forming chains and rings, as if running your tireless fingers over unimaginable instruments.

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For Nick

Two days after Voyager's robot sensors first gathered the music of Saturn (its toning cry, where solar wind meets planetary bow shock, fired back to Earth across a billion miles) and we stood in the auditorium to hear over the big speakers its boom and crackle and bell-like moan-two days after, I stood by your mother and heard your birthday arrive, fetal monitor transmitting to us from the depths of her body that muffled whooshing of your tiny heart. So tell me, Nick: Which was more mysterious, and which came from farther away?

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Uterus

Oh pagan organ, how far our sons and daughters have gone, pale Christians that they no longer adore you

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Bulletin Board

Walking a university hall, I pulled up hard to see livid photographs on some bulletin board outside the Speech and Hearing Department-God forgive me but they looked like vaginas: big rude OKeefian blossoms, each wet and reddish-pink with a great biconvex slit in the middle, cats-pupil shape opening onto darkness of the inner body, slender red lips on either side-and it took me a moment to realize: Of course. Vocal cords. But all that day and night it kept at me, murmuring, this sacred visceral coincidence: sister organs that out of darkness bring new beings to thresholds of flesh, upwellings of the infinite mystery: child-utterance.

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To My Sibling, Miscarried 1956

Catching a fragrance of nectarines from the basket on the table, I feel how strange it is that you're not here, find myself wondering who you might have been. At my grade school, well-meaning nuns gave us their strange perfunctory tale of unborn babies drifting in Limbo. But I was born, and have come to fruit, my sons on the floor here giggling and bucking like horses, as if five short years ago neither was compounded of infinite nothingness. Now that the mystery of Me is a bit clearer in the mystery of Them, I think of You who never came from our mother, you who are less now than a fragrance of nectarines in a breeze from the window so slight only my new-shaven face can feel it.

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Sun Dance
(for D.K.)

A woman we know bears a recessive gene and wed it to her husband's own beyond all likelihood and so gave to their five children a rare disease that slowly destroys the nerves and closes over the soul in a useless body. Even if I made a sweat and purified myself with sage, gashed arms and chest for this family, my supplicant blood flowing free as prayer--if I calmed my spirit, hung myself from the great center pole of the Sun until the prongs tore through my chest-even if visions came sunbursting over me like white clouds tumbling above the plains, even then, none of this would change for them.

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A Catholic Boy

Sister says to fold our hands, to think of God and His Holy Mother. But I'm distracted by the coolness of my palms against each other.

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Anorexia

My sister died when none of us were looking. She'd grown thin as a rake-handle, leaf-thin, cold as November wind, an autumn world withdrawn into its narrowing self. We were many and loud with desires, a big happy family, the envy of others, played basketball in our parents driveway, drank beer and talked long into the night, ate like farm animals. But she'd learned to hate food, to fear it, slowly became a desperate impoverished dictatorship sealing its own borders. She moved to Chicago, left teaching to become a flight attendant, loved us quietly from the distance her new appetite for suffering forced her to, from jet aisles where she served food to strangers, looking appropriately slender in her uniform. We loved the sun, met for family dinners, began producing grandchildren, went camping out under the bright fertile stars-forgive us, we didn't want to know how the planets were spinning out of their orbits, drifting, fragmenting, colliding there in her head.

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Poem for My Sister Who Died Anorexic

Dear one, gone so long ago: Last night we were watching TV and got hungry, so I heated up some leftover pizza from that place down the street and we ate. The many tastes mingled in our mouths, cheese, pepperoni, olives, onions, crust, and we drank orange juice with it, so sweet you could taste the daylight of that far sky where the orange tree was. Afterwards, happy in body's contentment and innocent love of food, happy too in human satisfaction, I lay down to sleep beside the one I love.

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A Bit of Advice for Times of Trouble

(found poem)

The body carries that incontestable flawless artistry of forgetful joy, happy animal, its members boast of nothing, are neither monumental nor especially concerned, cannot derive from experience any great fear or hope (though body is pavilion of all we dream or love or dread), loses all trace of the broken sentences anxiety sets running through us, carries no self-hurting force unless we insist it, huddles over no cares but the simplest, stamps out no bitter ritual-grounds of recrimination within the self, is like glass or rock crystal, takes the sunlight, gives it back, can be destroyed, but for now is just a man--a woman--a child.

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