Song
Disowned
Changed my mind
Missed the point
left the kitchen and its ragù for the moon
the spot on the lungs I thought
was the end of a wire
the Sea of Nectar, the Sea of Fertility. Left the line
to a telephone ringing
in a dream
and its fucking clarity for the lake effect
calling me home. You were in the
dream
clarity, like truth, is Mussolini. I loved
your black hair using
all the light
the uniforms, the horses in harness, trains on time, belief
I thought the mother
death was drugstore
in place of reckoning, feeling. Changed my mind about
martyrdom, numbskull
emotional self-help
drinking the cyanide, shooting the Mexican tar heroin
from glossy magazines spindled in
offices
into my arm—just a taste—changed arms
of oncology and MS in
social work
wrapped in surgical tubing like phylacteries, a prayer
when I asked my mother where she
was
for a vein, for a killed god. Changed wills
on the scale of the green to red
Pain Chart
changed number, changed rhythm, changed brain
that hung on the wall
of the office
of the Pain Clinic
from fight and flight to love in the time of contingency
I thought she’d
point me to
Changed when I held you, changed saturations, changed hues
amber or buttercup or
at worst primrose
I grew a limb, like a starfish, I grew a wound
but pointed to the scalding red
end
I could not change the despoiling
I became the prodigal
in green
world, the deal we had with it to be gorgeous
she became the Time Marine, Dean
of Morphine
damaged, repeated. Changed case and font, changed
what I wanted
red queen of our
orphancy changing
all we knew of dream
changed Texas to Paris, changed fear to pear, changed all the
menace
into body, and all we
knew of body
into this: I adore you and can’t live
milked of god and goodbye
without you
—Bruce
Smith
Bruce Smith's
new book of poems, Songs for Two Voices,
will be published
this spring. He lives in New York City and Syracuse and teaches
at Syracuse University.
Originally published in the December
2004/January 2005 issue of Boston Review
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