Clare Welsh
Triangle for Frank Stanford I could not. Forget the heads of chrysanthemum shedding their wild hair. It was an affair. He had a wife. The word like knife. Singing. Seeing the body, she was Amazed at the sight of three small holes ringing his heart. Later, his mistress wrote She remembers. She misremembers. She disremembers. Like everyone. I don’t know why he loved. Needed both. Rather I project the same impulse billowing the highway. The pulsed rain running from asphalt: I got to get out. I got to get out of here. In the end a letter—a word—exposed the corners of their triangle. Three nails stretching one buckskin. It’s no sin. To be deceived, deceiving. It’s a snake curled in a tire. The tail circling. Uncircling. Discircling. Driving a stolen truck up a hill, he is not the truck. The wife, lover is not the truck. What the truck is, no one knows. It feels ancestral. Humid. The open window cuts a song from the wind. It is the song where he gets everything he wants. A moon sunk in sugar. A melting. Body of sweat and perfume. A feeling. One cliff to drive off. Again and again the front porch. The orange peel of his heart wedged in his short fingernail. Right there. Against the tender throbbed flesh. The heart, a seeped fruit on the pine plank. And open. If someone saw him here like this, he’d die. ** This poem was first published in HAD. ** first thirst on the river the mill hums wet /tinnitus / song of staying with / in the insect / hiss of algae / bloom / my rush to a man / his scabbing / koi tattoos climbing each joint / sway of fish eye / pendants knot his hair / brushing my breast / i give / brackish head / get / a tongue of milk snake / the lowest point of want all / walls / superstitions / blown open to wetland / thickets / in the distance a bull barks / again i never wanted a life / boat from this eyot of heron claw grasping at runnel these / willow roots tugging scrap metal in / my rib / a marrowing web of cells in / each / a river / god of halogen ink / dirt moons / drunk / lost men / horses crossing the water / a shore of throats echoing / his cock/ a drowned tree / pulls the tide ** Hydra for Marianne Ihlen The island is named for the monster, for the story of the monster existing in opposition to the hero who decapitates its one, infinite head. There is no bounty for this. No reward in heaven. Hercules slays the hydra and the task counts for nothing. This is determined by the king who decides what counts. Some men on the island consider themselves the king. Most consider themselves Hercules. Few consider themselves the hydra, and among these few, it is not an identity so much as a convenience to fall back upon when they’re tired. The human standard of dignity takes effort: a Herculean effort, sighs one man, the one with the glass pipe in his guitar case. Being a hydra only requires apathy, and time. In the sun the men chase euphoria. Because of this, they are small, bright, and dying all the time. When they take vacations from themselves–yearly, monthly, daily, then every ten minutes–they don’t call home. They are too high to feel the breath of the word, the long o curving like a horse hip: home. Their sex slips, tender meat from the bone. Back to the king. Though rarely physically present, he is always there in spirit. He is like a photograph, an object of adoration, or rage if that’s what the men need. Printed in newspapers, his image shape-shifts to a savior. A tyrant. A husband. A pervert. A warlord. A guru. A fresh man, too young for politics. A decrepit man, too senile to rule. A man’s man. An alpha. A demure, pussy-whipped. Cuck. This shape-shifting is mutually beneficial. It keeps the king powerful, the men snug in their comfortable avoidance of the aspects of themselves too embarrassing to acknowledge. It’s cathartic to talk of the king’s affair, difficult to talk of one’s own. Hercules, too, is always there, but in the flesh. Hercules is the beautiful woman all the men love. She wears loose, white fabrics while preparing petite feta sandwiches. She places the sandwiches on trays with wildflowers, and sets the trays on side tables. Of course the men dedicate songs to her. She’s Hercules. Hercules toils in the sun with her child, with the men, with the salt-bitten air, alone. The hubris of any hero–and all heroes are muses–is mistaking service for love. The heads of the hydra snap, seep, regenerate. Her mother might have said the thing about housework is it never ends. Hercules, the beautiful woman, didn’t make the men forget so very much–as one singer claimed. They forgot themselves. They couldn’t remember how to shape their grip to hold a kitchen rag, and so panicked, burned the house they built to the ground. Hercules abandoned the quest of the hydra. In the end it was a series of labours, only some of which counted. The men recall fondly the labours of Hercules, though they would not call them labours. They call them the invincible summers, or the wild heavens, or the warm waters where they first took off their clothes. Hercules did not intend for this to happen. Like any traveler, she was only seeking some reliable company. Hercules counts her labours, all her labours, as labours. Of beauty, of love. Of love. Of love. ** siren you don’t know / me i am a hollowing / bite of mud / the edge of what you want / to believe about yourself / the air belongs to me / more than anyone / i know your dreams of ice cream / the women you should have lost / touch with / the guilt you suck on the most / interesting penny candy / i know what you want / before you can / accept your wanting / every time it is / the song where nothing breaks you / stay tied to that / small splinter you carry / dreaming your pain / a patrician / come a little / closer / hear the hook / in my throat ** Notes on Lost Highway The mind falls apart like a woman without shoes. I sit by the window with an antler. Found it out down there. In the pines. My ventricle from heaven. Bone-bright. Tough. Unlike the frayed plate of my thumb nail, or any other comfort I’ve been known to stroke in the dark. Lit with lightning. Often I think of Townes Van Zandt before he was famous. A mad boy. Whose parents loved him. Enough to get him electric shock therapy behind mint-green doors. As his molars bit the leather stick, where did his spirit go? They say grief is a place. Mine’s a desert. Here’s another allusion to a lost, brilliant man who could have been my father. I have as many as the day is long. As the dusk is coyote-hungry. A mentor once said why don’t you listen to something else when I wanted her to ask who–not what–are you looking for? Oh I have fortified, one might say calcified myself against the heat. Sigils tattooed on my fingers. Poison to sedate my hands. From killing all the deer. Each one a day. Galloped through me. ** This poem was inspired by the musician's drawing, Lost Highway. Townes Van Zandt (American) 1980. Click here to view it. This poem was first published at The Ekphrastic Review. ** Clare Welsh is a writer and visual artist living in Pittsburgh. Her most recent poems can be found in The Los Angeles Review and The Southeast Review. She is working on a book. |
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