Issue 32: Calvin Bedient

Door with a Fin

              How nice it would be to die swimming toward the sun

                                                                 ––Corbusier

How much longer must I sit among the dark

sisters of feeling? I've been summoned for another

hostile confab. How angry they look, they who call

me their Lord Creator. Seated on empty apple crates

 to discipline their bony asses, they won't say how

deep they are inside me. I'm a Hamas tunnel, they

tell me, and they're captive inside me. How dramatic

they are! Embarrassments, slights, defeats, every

little hurt – they hint that they are of these the sum,

half-born personalities. That's how they talk: "Of these." 

They would choose not to be of me. Don't be childish,

I admonish, and mutter, bitches roller skating around

me like hornets.

Today, they ask me about jouissance, wanting me

to "spill the tea." Because they know how bad I am

at joy.

             Well, I tell them,

think of a door. Suddenly it opens to a night of stars.

How pretty, one of them says from her hornet face.

They're all like that, hornets in my bloodstream.

I remind them that I nearly died in 2020. I've been

Through things, I say, an involuntary sob in my voice.

Yes, remarks one, you're rather proud of that.

Made you feel a veritable favorite of the gods.

You're the strongest person we know, Cal. You'll beat this.

Get well soon! blah blah. But, you see, there's something

Repellent about you. I have it, says another: a talent

For being unpleasant, resentful, and ungenerous.

As displayed in Itri, Severn, when, like unto a flood

Rising beside you, a small herd of three-year-olds

suddenly stopped and for a full enigmatic minute

stared at you. Wild goat children, you thought they were,

 In filthy hides, and not a soul to look after them.

Perhaps they searched in you for a sign of kindness.

Their redeemer! But they blew it off, seeing a jelly

Fish of a man, empty, transparent. You hurried on

Through mountains infested with brigands, to join

John Keats before he dies in Rome, leashed to his

Request that you share his death.

Miles later, at customs in the mountains,

Who was that ragged man among the beaked crones

Circling about the carriages, gesturing and shouting

With them in an incomprehensible language?

And Keats just three days from his death, he who

Was born to rise from the pool of his phlegm, no

Drowned Narcissus he, and be among The English poets.

And as for you, are you an outstanding anything? You

Wouldn't be Jealous, would you, Severn? Not small.

Could any canvas of yours catch the breath?

A wheel flying off beside a cliff is something to see,

The coach tilting at the edge, your mother rising

And sinking in the brown froth of the river below,

Gesturing and calling. And again you didn't help,

Simply couldn't as the officer orders you to get the

>*! carriage off the road, though you were just

A passenger, and sneers at your incompetence.

Call yourself a man, Severn? You struggle try to refit

The wheel. You didn't dream this difficulty, did you?

Sounds like a nightmare. For that matter, aren't you,

Even, the thief and murderer hunted even now

Among the rocks and trees on the Gran Paradiso?

And weren't you the pervert who accosted a pure-

Faced child in a London street and told him there was

Once an author, French of course, who took out

His sleeping father's organs and lay them down

Around him, and waited for their bubbling blood

To squeak and confess? In short, are you, by any measure,

A right man, Severed? Didn't you sleep in sheets

Smelling of night sweats and male milk? Why did the goat

Children wear your English face? What minor artist

Itched to throw a rock down on Poetry under brooding

Dark clouds as he passed below on the road with quince-

Steps and tongue soother than the creamy curd

And stop the damn coughing of that delicate thing,

Everybody's darling, who required you

To travel through reality's hell to wait on him?

Are you given to murderous thoughts? What

Made you spy long and long in the Campagna

Di Roma as a fat Cardinal shot hundreds of small birds?

Yet you whine about the trauma of being

Stuffed into a newborn's skin-bag, lungs on fire,

Expelled from some borderless place; which was

A wrong thing, and a bitter. Do you really prefer

To be unbound like a gas? Are you mad?

You would be found out anyway, as on the

Road to Albano, among vines swagging from tree 

To tree, a voice shouted from a tree top, Stop playing

 The tragic victim, child, there's one in the house already.

And Keats in a parlous state, and would he at least

enter Rome at a reasonable hour in his vehicle of

Genius on which is balanced, ta-da, a golden vat of Phlegm?

Here I am, he says, waking and finding you, his loyal

Friend, sitting beside him. "Stay back," he says,

"Your breath is cold, it comes like Ice." And the mucus

Boiling in his throat. And when the doctor opened

The body, he found no lungs!  Which were an

Abomination and astonishment! How long was he like

The bee that sucked honey from a cup in a lab, whose

Gorging didn't stop when its abdomen was severed,

Severn, but continued oozing out where the abdomen

Had been? The great Odes written without the lungs!

Consider that, Severed.

Don't ask us again if we, too, still feel the birth-murder

In our trashable skin, expelling us from some preposterously

Halcyon sphere. Alas, we feel what you feel. We have no

Choice. We don't want to be told that, one day, you'll lift

Us up and carry us to the sun's lair and with your breath

Like ice throw us into bodiless flames. Just say, come out

With me now, come out and walk, the sun is shining.

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The poem warps some of the incidents recounted in Alessandro Gallenzi’s biography Written in Water: Keats's Final Journey, Alma Books, 2022, and echoes some of the language as well.

Cal Bedient has published five books of poetry and his sixth, a new and selected, is slated for 2026. He is the co-editor of Lana Turner: a Journal of Poetry & Opinion.

Copyright © 2024 by Calvin Bedient, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author