Embedded Files
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.
–––––––––––––––––
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
Report abuse