JOSHUA POTEAT
The Scenery of Farewell (and Hello Again)
In the asylum's cadaver room,
a
janitor holds his lantern in wonder
over a barrel of breasts cut from the month's dead.
It
cannot be like this, we gasp.
It doesn't work this way.
If
it helps: they were sick, insane.
O.K., I know, I know, it doesn't help.
For
now, try to forget the janitor, the barrel,
what grows around us, around our hearts.
As in: sit up straight.
As
in: the whole, the aggregate.
The heart gets bigger as it dies,
and
I can feel it growing sometimes:
blue heron swelling above the river's tremble,
pushing
itself away from all it knows.
But for the heart's voice, the body would disappear
into
itself, shrinking like the flooded field
of horsetail reeds on this riverbank.
The heart's growth, I'm sure, has nothing to do with
love,
or
the body, which could be the same at times.
The same as the asylum across the river and its reflection
in
the eyeglasses of the janitor,
each desperate version needing the other so deeply
that
even the janitor looks away from the buildings
and back towards the river,
already
ashamed at what the body can do,
the shape of love nestled down, pushed into the reeds.
Tumor: lamb's ear: gray button of nipple:
barrel
of Saint Agnes: Agnes in the trees.
How can we speak?
This
is how we make something ours.
We stare at it until it becomes us and we walk away
with
a fist-sized lump in our pocket,
humming a sad tune in case someone passing by
thinks
we're happy. And we are.
What is removed drops horribly into a pail.
So
we don't forget.
He wrapped it in a handkerchief. We wrapped it.
Try
not to blame the heart.
It is soft and is filled with us,
the
filaments of cherry blossom, silent cathode.
The heart exists to grow, and to take a breast from the barrel
would
mean treason of the body.
How can we speak of it?
This is the conversation we didn't want to have.
Of
course it has to do with love.
The body, however, can only go so far until it wears
down,
until
we're left with the janitor, faceless in his overalls,
his hands alive with touching a softness that is completely new
and
our hands beginning to memorize that softness.
Knowing this won't help much.
We want
a face, a guilty look over a shoulder.
The foxglove, the cornflower,
the
sky from the river's long road.
We want a scene, a place that remains real,
despite
all this sad-getting-in-the-way-of.
The asylum, its awnings loose and ruined
in
the wind, the patients dressing the radiators
with soiled gowns. No, not that one.
The
heart can confuse. A field of reeds, then,
a sycamore, the janitor undressing on the riverbank.
Yes,
that will do. Stare at it.
Forget everything that grows around it.
If it's possible, and I'm not sure if it is.
Thorn
grove of the blind: handsome lamb: harvest this day.
The heart knows nothing of this place,
walking
beyond the asylum's gates
and through the mist of poplar seeds,
fluff
and hilum, a heron's nest
in the tallest limbs,
but
it's not a question of knowing
the landscape and what hovers in it,
of
how it disappears into the horizon.
It's how a sycamore glowing in the twilight
beside
a barn becomes ours now
by simply being there, existing.
We no longer have to stare. It is ours as we swim
in
darkness to a lighted boat across the river,
the breast slipping from our pocket,
from
the handkerchief's blossom
and the crawfish gathering in the bottom's current
are
at first amazed with the white oval of flesh,
halo of the above, until it dissolves,
becomes
nothing and the river remains.
The river is something we do not want to know.
The
difference between a heron flying low
in the distance over a marsh
and
a heron mangled by wild dogs at your feet:
it is the inner workings we avoid,
that
chart of wing and eye that reveals
what we've always feared,
and where we find ourselves
won't
be much of a surprise, coming up for air,
the faint metallic taste of silt,
of
autumn in our mouths.
Let the heron remain blue in the evening air
and
widen over us.
Let the sycamore wait with our new white overalls
hanging
on the nails in its bark,
frozen in the half light of time, of farewells.
Let the river bring us to the boat
as
if we never entered it, our wrinkled hands
dry and strange, our lover lying naked
in
the bow under a lantern,
eager for the promised gift,
the
heart-shaped face of mutiny,
saying Hello, it's good to see you again. 
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