Duriel HARRIS
self portrait in desire
who thought it was a flood or an issue of faucet, or a tinny ringing
and favored the cupboards’ trembling, quaking proximity of trains
and the antiseptic play: swab along rim. who, bookish, loitered and loafed,
enticed by the boy in a dream of snow, who, beastly, scurried, low
to ground, blocking the vents, stuffing blowers with down; whose mind
was a tailored maze of hare and hedgehog, rabid skunk and radiator
ruffle: a puff of heat escaping, stenciled along the surface where some refuse
and others multiply, milling.
who, begging, thought it was a flood or a surge of lava, or a chemical
bonding: a molten slur repurposed, imagined terrain spun from myrrh, a cone,
a brocade smother, twisted pine chord and altar brass. who, hard wired, fled
in human tongues, suspended, syntax and inflection, foreign intoxicant.
who, moved, heard nothing, everything from the gut splattering wet;
who, strapped in, strapped on, and became, flowed out into silicon
filling, suction.
who thought surely it was a flood or felt baldly arthritic, a red joint before rain
or divined reaching, nurse to the floorboards’ weepy eye. who swallowed, feeling
little more than without speech, wedged into bedsag, hunting looted silver
of a future’s dream. who faked, picked, and prodded into half days. who held
the heater singly to the throat to coax the slimy membrane of sickness out
into hospital for the pill, broth and gelatin, for the walking away—every letter
shifted forward seven paces—and the official papers hidden in all that crisp negro hair.
self portrait (with vial & corn tash)
I know the rituals of snake jaw & skin.
—I am not an agent of radical acts,
fringed tongue, I am a word full of E’s
—a cool porcelain belly, a spore,
a briny rusted lock, a passing scab,
an errant cell turning. I do not thirst
to destroy. I do not carry in my pockets:
roaches, forties, hardness, lawlessness, sloth,
the outer part. A symbol of grief & nettling
strops, I do not spew bright colors, do not
practice holy rolling. I am not contagious.
— In the path, I am the point nearest the sun,
a shunt in night, a gradual cumulative effect
—an involuntary stop, a deviation from
common rule, a macule, an intermittent flash,
a gleam, a deflected blow, a steeple, sleep
ripening in the break. (Certainty breeds
localized death, composts viral drills, partial dis-
closures, paralytic furnaces & vague complex mocking
sounds, fierce where the curves cross themselves.)
My transformational grammar, a shaking, gray
passage, a puddle in the sentence: the darkest
layer of bone, a huddled shrug, a current. I know
—the smarting parlor gait, the level, the lot,
the lurching shadow of the aeriform house
—where, upon shingles, rage once reached
into a boy & the boy into his mouth
& pulled from the root a permanent tooth.
& still I eye the lid behind the lid, translucent
refrain, the crevice, studying the spoiled needle
scrawl, the giddy fist’s flick against water’s
particle force.
—I am what is left
when the body has been thoroughly burned.
Unfurled
The Pain-Body Speaks in Repose
i.
Where there is will, apathy and subjection
I am a faithful servant gone to market.
ii.
Gradually, purity—the blood idea—
will soften the contour of each living man,
drawing out the will to power, to command
enormity, vagrant and enrapt, a body sorely knit
like mine, a mighty swirling column
of refuse and scraps.
To see after it and see to it, I am.
That I am, I cater annihilation, I will
break your restless walking to flickers
and taps. Burrowing, I torment dreams
and waking fears, clear wind
and notches of smoke. I scrounge
and make do, scuttle and mangle
and roam to make barren. Seeking,
I find—the inflammable ligature
—the human thread,
and use it as fuel.
iii.
Yet, who can but come to table at the invitation of a feast?
Charity compels labor
and conscience begs no pardon.
Traversing the earth, I whistle and build,
chisel and chirr, amassing
roving death dealers’ porous ghosts
and memories of the bewildered dead’s pathetic squealing.
I nurse hatreds to dress hatreds,
marshal squadrons of dogs, locusts, and carrion birds
and send them forth with poignant clarity (they shall run
and not be weary). O drunken momentum. O sun-baked splatter.
Insatiate, they, too, shall devour.
iv.
Come and celebrate with me this triumphant living sin.
In praise of its stench
low and spiraling downward,
hawkish whir, nexus of the eye
fallen to seed the ground.
In praise of its deep structure
and obscenity, its flesh wager
and decomposition wilding, wagging
into subtle architecture, fingers, isolated
joints, remnants of suppurating wounds.
In praise of its bald-faced supplicants
coaxing the unseen with jars of jaw fragments
and teeth, bits of scalp and hair wrapped in brown
butcher paper, and trinkets, obstinate vertebrae
brushed a metallic blue, the bony burr
of hatchet holes and skulls in rows like shoes to pick over.