Masturbation in a Georgian Bath
The waters of the bath do not rise
And they do not fall. They know
No keeper — the clinking arthropod
Lays its eggs on the limestone rim,
The Dragon sips on squamous springs.
Know the names: skin-cell, bile,
Whitening powder. This bath
From which I rise bears no ripples.
The water is a fossil — the mudbed
Shifts between my toes. And up upon
The sky are bared the women of
A painter’s harem. Portrayed loving
And blue in shrouds of golden bauble-stuff.
They sit aligned like rows of geese
On the jungle temple’s ziggurat.
One by one diving into prostration
Before the god of blood, head-first.
Or so we’re told. Too loving they’re
Presented — no father’s eyes should
Paint his daughters’ so. So I have
Conquered the image — arrayed —
In the stars above my glazing sight
To look at me, to look at all the waters
Of the baths that smell like me, that smell
Like many others.
The Lake-Lizard
“And dark creeks’ secret ledges, horror-strewn,/Where giant reptiles, pululant with lice,/Lapse with dark perfumes from the writhing trees.”
I The Birth
And she goes down to the lake of our God
lays herself in the water that pools round
the body holy
The tail is straight and gray like a rudder
the legs move together and flatten to
paddles like oars
And the lake-lizard beaches itself to glut on
cattle and lake grass
the bone-toothed water dogs flicking its
arabesque veiny eyes with claws, making
danger in the bushes
This is the danger — the dobar-chu and the
highway men stringing up travelers
she knows well that the ichthyosaur wishes no
harm as she wanders
She drinks of the lymph taken up by the
cat-studded tongue of our God
and she webs her feet and scales her body
and steadies her head and her fluke in the
stomach of our God
II The Marriage
She who came to the moor in a shawl of
black burlap
the landowner spied her with his wet eyes
he who lived in the hall of black glass in his
rags
He had gathered from the wet distant
marshes fine reed-cloth
and he dressed her, bathed her feet in
perfumes that swallowed the nose
she who came to the moor in a shawl of
black burlap
Tho she loathed it there; loathed carpets
and the clang of ebon angles, but she
loved his arms
he who lived in the hall of black glass in his
rags
And he chewed her up with his wandering
teeth and mosquito netting
thru her bangled blue wed-dress the gnats
stained her skin with their sting teeth
she who came to the moor in a shawl of
black burlap
Thru the dress bulged the baby
his face like his face all white cotton
In a pit near her their wed-bed he kept
prone her all-scaly lizard skin
he who lived in the hall of black glass in his
rags
And she loved the small body and dressed
him all up in gray burlap
and she asked him for secrets and cooed
him and kissed his sweet forehead
she who came to the moor in a shawl of
black burlap
One night the skin was slipped out like a
brassiere of silk
The boy left to live in a house of peat free
of his father. The father was two crying legs
that shook themselves at God
he who lived in the hall of black glass in his
rags
And he left the boy teeth that were
wandering and pointed towards conquest
And she left him red eyes so often talked
up during his days as a knight
she who came to the moor in a shawl of
black burlap
he who lived in the hall of black glass in his
rags
III The Hunt
And the son walks out through the forest.
Glint on his dappled pelt on the thin trunks
his horse snorts and bleeds heavy and
glinting with light is the mode of his lance
Down the bank is a small swimming dragon
the lance is lead-tipped it will melt in
ensuing noxious fire
And while the beast chokes he hacks at its
blubbery neck with a coarse saber
the water around the horse’s legs is red the
horse is cut up by the teeth and the eyes
and the rough-shod claws
And there is that look in the eyes — the
glance — of recognition?
and as her body sheds scales she is
reconciled
And tragedy after tragedy born in the lake
of our God
and he weeps in a peat house cut horse
screams in the stable round the torn body
holy
Robert and the Forest Dragon, the Elephant Bones, the Floodplains
Robert E. Howard is the name of a thin and rootlike man who works as a dishwasher in Chicago. Robert comes home with wet on his face and this water drips down him or up him — from ceilings, floors, puddles on the street and approaching battalions of rain. By night Robert washes dishes and smokes cigars in the kitchen of Pete’s Famous Italian, which sells diner fare and pizza. In the sun hours he is a worshipper of Helios-Resplendent, the Fire God he has made in the basement of the apartment complex. The floor there is limestone. Helios-Resplendent, load-bearing Helios is made out of wires and thread. He beats like a man does, heart of the building. Robert lies on the pavement in the light of a sun and hears his sun running in the bellies below the Earth. Robert buys knives. Straightens his teeth with pliers — sharpens his teeth. Robert buys paint. Paints the office of his landlord in a shimmering red. Has a gold laugh over it in the dishpit with Jona from Guadalajara, who put a village to flame and went north to seek the heart of a Persian princess studying at Northeastern, thirty years his junior. Another man, Wide Adam, Adam of the leopard’s eyes is a killer and he wears his felled ones’ neckties to work. He is saving up to seal his head in a great cat’s cast of iron, where he will starve to death. They are all model Americans. Robert is snapped out mouth and brain by the fast-running Helios and must sit and rest his head for a moment.
Three floors above Robert lives a dark sorcerer. This has come to Robert in a dream. Fifty years from now, all over Tampa, Florida, clubs and axes of mahogany and obsidian and sharpened leather will be found all across the flat plane where glass pyramids will stand. They will be plucked from carparks and DMVs and walk-in freezers and crawlspaces and panned out of drainage canals and strip-club ashtrays. Those men will find them will know what to do with them or have their implements of God taken away. The oldest world lives in the hole of America and America will live forever, in fifty years and after that. Tonight though Robert, hearing the sorcerer build a dragon out of elephant-bone and cattleparts. The dragon heaves its belly low across the asphalt like a sauropod, and it beats its tusks against in stegosaurian scutes, such is the flexibility of its neck. Its neck grinds and twists apart like fraying cords of oakum. And sorcerer upon its back eyes gleaming, its eyes gleaming, the ancient dragon of long-dead or long-miscarried forests will trample through the streets, its massive single ear turned towards the earth, its gleaming eyes bleating out in an act of aggression. The forest dragon of horrible woods unknown to man will hear the runnings of unctuous Helios, Helios-Resplendent of the radiant and burnished skin and will pluck him from the earth with its Columbian Mammoth’s-trunk. Such aggression will be repaid with aggression. Robert steps out into the hall to do battle with the forest dragon. Robert steps out in the hall to go to work. Up he goes down the stairs towards the bus, goes down the hall up the stairway towards the sorcerer’s apartment. The sorcerer’s eyes are sunken yellow into his head that peels like birch bark, and Adam of the many victims laughs his spilling laugh out of the dish pit. The dishboys wash their hands and feet in the sink, and look at dirty magazines Jona has left, his princess asking him to give them up. The walls are painted black and there is meat on the floor meat and bits of dishstuck slime and grease that Robert lays his hands on. The apartment is the heart of the dragon — all around the building grow black scales and knotted keratins of dull green fur. The dragon grows its wild eyes and flashes the horrible god-destroying ear. Her bikini bottom is red and polka-dotted white. Robert readies the battle axe that appears sudden in his hand. Robert eddies in the soap and types up the uses for the gun prostrate on the telephone book. The time for dragons and gods rings out over the city and triumphant Robert continues to wash his hands until there is no hand and no saber, no shining conqueror’s eyes and the foam of the water is everything. It eddies in dishpools while Adam tells his grandmother story again. The formless nameless dragon falls upon the earth and unpredated Helios the running god runs up from the throat of the Earth and the sun begins to burn in tinderbox Chicago, Robert not looking up at the flames in the sky, Robert dishwashing and dragonslaying and dying.
And his ending burned and conquered dry Chicago into a dry plain with no folk treading upon it. An empty plane for now, wandering peoples running their voices along it, bouncing cries and songs off the dull grasses of the lakebed.
— Noam Hessler can be found on Twitter at @poetryaccnt1518. They are a New England poet.