JODY AZZOUNI
(from his book ‘The Lust For Blueprints’)
Natural Childbirth
Is a Must
Think of Zeus. First it starts as a headache,
as if his brain is a fetus trapped in his skull.
Wombs, for the most part, survive birth-trauma.
Eggs do not. The real story (no one told)
climaxes with Athena cooing
among the shards of her father’s skull,
something grey and bloody
leaking through her hands.
You can paste a skull back together again
(if you are gods).
You can stuff anything
(that happens to be lying around)
into the skull cavity
and the result will walk.
But despite the semantics of the word,
there are limits to omnipotence.
The official story is that she didn’t have
a childhood. But in point of fact
the intellect is omnivorous;
and the cynical and uncaring gods laughed
when they watched her cling to his chest
like a leech, cute as a button
with teeth,
the gore dripping onto the thick rug
as he shuffled back and forth.
(He giggled vacantly whenever he touched
Years later, stories circulate
of a demented rabbit vainly hopping up
under a woman’s dress or a divine idiot
raping a scarecrow. “He moves
in mysterious ways,” peasants chortle.
Meanwhile gods die
(under peculiar circumstances):
A flayed Pan found hours before
Athena wears her new fur; Poseidon
drowned; Hades buried alive; Aphrodite …
Centuries pass and we don’t hear much
except for occasional hints: a god
who sires himself on his virgin mother
(under suspicious circumstances),
a cosmos haunted by a holy ghost
(whose? We wonder).
Meanwhile, desperately secular,
we use lightning to run egg-beaters
and hope for the best.
Landscape by Dali
It persists, surprisingly:
a boneless statue, its meat
A theological sky:
eyes scattered like birds.
Near the murdered clock
a virus, its treasured codex,
blueprint for immortality,
sleeps in a bottle.
The faint-veined ruby
its throb barely detectable
hangs in the air like a heart.
Outside the cloud of paint
Something is ticking.
Pray it doesn’t wake up.
Killing its Parents
What a thing to do to a child: put
it in a sandbox, and watch
as everything slips through its fingers.
When it is old enough to take revenge,
it will plant a hex in the cellar,
water the markings with dust,
and watch the tombstones grow.
From then on its hands will be the wrong shade
no matter how much it washes them in light.
Years before the bodies are packed away,
the ghosts will be about,
lurking in bathroom mirrors, its mate’s face,
the gestures of its offspring;
and staring surly,
should it try to look at itself
or at something it loves.
Years before the bloodless deed is finally done,
it will hire exorcists:
paying dearly for the couch rites
of the strange doctors
who dabble in the dark arts of therapy.
Each evening
when it could be in bed with a friend,
it will polish the totems in the cellar
until it is time to mark the pale stone
with names and dates
and move them out to the graveyard.
And on that day,
it will find offspring playing there,
soil running through their fingers
like sand which the sun has baked
to the colour of shadow.
Well, son, we could
always throw
the pigskin around
Time was,
I would have introduced you to blood,
taught you to slice open the throat,
strip the skin from the carcass gracefully.
Cooking didn’t come naturally to anyone,
you understand,
so in those days we forced the women
to burn the food, and this way
we could press something hot
against our lips again.
They never figured out the thrill,
never saw what we were grinning about
while the hot juice drooled down our faces.
Time was,
I would have taught you to love blood,
the relatives I mean, the tribe,
and kill those your genes didn’t recognize.
Not long ago,
we could have gunned down indians together
and told your mother how the bodies twitched
while she served us hot turkey.
Even these days we can raise the blood
And chatter about the homeland,
Send the dumber ones
Maybe I shouldn’t tell you,
but sometimes I doubt we’ll survive
unless they perfect cloning soon,
let the daughters, like soft amoebas,
inherit the earth.
(But this wouldn’t help,
for they would trace bloodlines
anyway, and group into families,
tight like fists.)
Blood is thicker than water,
but fishing has its thrills, too:
the betrayal of something by its instincts,
the cold steel in the velvet flesh it must obey.
You haul it in by a thread,
the animal silent as if the hook
has ripped its voice out.
There’s a lesson here I can’t teach;
you’ll have to mutate your own way to it.
The Facts of Life
Think of Eden,
God’s green womb,
where the fruit hangs down
like strange spherical cheeks.
I tell you:
we were lucky to get out of there alive.
Nowadays,
kisses are two-faced
like promises kept and given.
Nowadays,
the skin needs company regularly,
friction is a gift,
and even pupils dilate when friends are near.
I admit the intimations of worse to come:
the dust is always suddenly there.
And raisins, wrinkled like warnings,
come boxed.
But tonight, when we hold hands,
The nerves blossom on the inside,
our bodies slowly burn the moist
calories slick between them;
even the pliant mouth is trustworthy.
Tonight the candle offers its single petal
and we are full of gods.
Later, after we sigh like sponges in bathwater,
there will be time to hear the soft
chewing sounds the clock makes.
But not until tomorrow morning
will it shriek its simple message.
Odin gets to see it all
Hungry for control, the dangfool god
gouges his own eye out
and drops it in the seedy well.
Then he gulps down the thick stew
Mirmir has ladled out for him: pond scum,
decomposing bird … not pure by a long shot
but the usual for neglected wells.
“I don’t think I’m any smarter,” Odin says,
the throbbing in his esophagus finally subsiding.
Mirmir shrugs and counsels patience.
Sure enough, at dawn some days later,
There is dew for the first time.
Those awake at such an hour wonder
what large thing has spent the night crying.
And some centuries hence, Christians
will suspect dew-drops are angel-eggs.
But for Odin they are new eyes,
and he sees the dawn
from everywhere at once.
Cries without sound
Darling,
You would not talk to me yesterday,
so now my crippled tongue is swollen
with the thoughts I wanted to express.
This letter too is crippled.
If you pull it out of its stamped glove,
it will reach out for you
like a fingerless palm.
How will you keep from laughing?
It is not warm, it has no grip,
no pulsing wrist, no blood,
but instead only the blue markings
of something sucked dry of sound.
You would not listen before.
Why should you hear anything now?
Eyes are cold creatures
safely gazing from their buckets.
If they have ears, it is as turtles do.
If they are touched,
it is only by their own moisture.
I can hope for this much at least:
Should my pen’s dark tears reach your eyes,
perhaps the soft orbs will echo
after their fashion, soak my image free
from your optic nerves,
stain the pages with it.
Cancer Can Be Fatal
Once there was sunlight in my urine
and now there is only blood.
The whitely-clad doctors have
fastidiously suggested
I leave my body to Science.
But Science has failed me and I
want revenge. How could I have thought
a hospital would have helped? Why
didn’t I think of the other inmates
curled up on their mattresses
like writing on tombstones?
I want to die now at home. But I am
too cowardly to invite the razor,
or listen to the gaseous music
my car can play. Instead
I sit in a bar, watch ice
cry itself into non-existence in my glass,
and wish my own death could be as romantic.
Handsome is
As handsome does
I prefer the little evils:
the holocausts of inconvenience.
I shingle up to my victims,
and while time clods along,
my fingers dance around the moments
like ghosts. Magicians steal insight:
I prefer the more tangible rewards
sleepy pockets offer.
Each wallet is a tame world
with its tiny economy,
flat people,
and leather borders.
As God must,
I skip from world to world,
take what I want,
and leave the rest in the trash.
Kill a rabbit
After I saw that T.V special the other night
after Mom told me I’d never been breastfed,
I remembered again the baby
you made me throw away
like garbage. It was something crawling
out of a sea gasping for air
while your doctor friends
pushed its face into a toilet.
I hope your life is almost over.
You were supposed to be nervous,
chewing your fingernails:
their half moons setting bloody in your cuticles;
your eyes black with ash, your cheeks wet.
But instead the nurse saw you put your face
down on my bed and snore
like a motor while someone else
in another room where you didn’t have to see it,
they scrapped my insides.
It could have been a girl.
But instead her fleshy crib threw her up
and afterwards my breasts hurt
as if they wanted to spit.
Hopefully, late at night sometime,
when you’re drunk enough for it
to make an impression,
something dead will recognize you’re its father
and reach for your ankle through a sewer grate.
Christmas Morning
My children strip the skin from their gifts,
pull the gaudy insides into the light,
and play with them.
I sit sullen, swallow a pill or two,
and watch the pine tree,
covered with wire and glass,
die slowly.
“There is a history to all of this,”
I tell the dying tree,
the flayed gifts.
“All around us are the bones
of one god or another.”
My children ignore me;
my husband says, “Cass.”
So I tell them we need new holidays
for the global warming that is coming soon.
We can pray for the rebirth of snowflakes,
we can pretend they hang in the nightsky
waiting, always waiting, and occasionally crying.
We can sit in our loincloths
around the cool fluorescent lampfire
and listen to the elders tell stories
(about ice cubes).
We can pray to the fridge.
My husband has had enough.
He approaches, takes my hand,
leads me away. I wish my dead friend
who is everywhere
a happy birthday.
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