Why Can’t I Touch It?
de Kooning’s “Women Singing II”, aurora borealis,
Sarah’s knee, his buried face
There it is in his secret womb: a child
Brother not birther but still
This late at night the force increases He wails in low tones
creek beneath a bridge
hearing itself for
an arch’s time
Weight bearing heroic titles
Spinegrower or Bloodgiver
One heart an unread page tucked under the larger
Colors and their clairvoyance blue dawn whispering beneath its whisker of clouds what will happen
today blue but hours out yet
What force drove the growing bulge in his belly
It’s not his body the baby will need
annealed nipples unnourishing
But what force
Spiral force Force of buds pushing against their shroud
black mar on the golden ratio’s shimmer
How to exit an unwelcome vessel punished in containment
He thinks of his stomach as the skin of fruit
as a jackal’s way to cut a pomegranate
sliced into six
wedges of juice and turned over like wet stones
The boy-mother moves lithe through pre-morning bruise hours
away from the house
away the forthcoming sorrow dipped into today
like a finger in a bowl of melted chocolate
ringed at meters where the small heart could stop
Slayed into trust the movement through jagged grass
Constitution of inbetween
The boy-mother is
the first dawn walker this far afield
with face full of spider web
trailblazing disturbance
toward his sense of
a secret pool
deep in a copse of birch he’s never seen
but he knows where
deer drink shotgun shells old beer cans
Water cold as all in the spirit closed like an eye around the day’s offal
The boy-mother imagines lifting off of its slow surface
in heat waves
murmurs a song
how to care for a child he never should have
Song is motion is gilted time
shorn like wool from folds of the throat
sound spandrels expand in sky’s roving ceiling
Sound listless as a reader’s hand
Already the boy-mother can hear the pool’s low bass tone past the dip of the horizon maybe angels moaning
in fear power for his final year
Unnatural the boy-mother says as he rests
hands run down the ruts of an oak
the gaps where water runnels in storms
alone on the front
fields in shadow kept tight underneath the year’s snow
wind caught on the prairie’s edge dark forest begins
How he strikes on moves on is ancient on
his new conspiracy Imagined at the grocery store
what freak child what monster what abhorrence what clatter
they will say
The child’s child will be perfect he says blown as if from melted white sand
His a problem requiring new language commands from the resurrected army of dead
language
or seraphim directives language held against the bloodless morning sky
same a shout for help from deep in a well
language like
snowflakes falling into the blue pool dissolved His hands will have to be many kinds of hands his songs wholly new against every morning
it’s ribbons of years he is worried about that and the power of naming it matters
it matters what he will call it it matters what is living inside his own vessel
unseen writhing
The arousal of power comes from
names
He imagines his
house on fire with blue flame horse jumping over broken fence
mouth a pile of blood and dinner field of hands blown
about in the breeze
a beech tree in a crisp winter morning
No one to be seen but the sounds of walking on hard snow
mob’s footsteps coming mirrored in leaving
either him or his child displayed
the private pool deep in the back forty somewhere swimming
portal to a safe future
the sheen of face before the face breaks the water tension how the child will bring
about a new era
it’s not horror if new but a new force of spirit arrived here
And the boy-mother is singing sagged against a cedarwood fence
And he is singing the sky a pipe
And he is singing like a long root
And he is singing often into the barrows the swales
There were ancient throughways he feels
the boy-mother traces perfectly in his pain
walking ancient paths that lead
to a blue pool near
and nearer
kick in his belly
black lessening blue rising Everything is blue
The boy-mother is blue from cold Before his first breath
the child’s child’s tiny fists will be blue
Dawn chorus from bird throats rises in blue smoke A hard song
Boy-mother struck in rings of gold chatters
At the Holy See
You and your every nutrient turn briefly blue
in the shining basilica. Sign of rich belonging.
We drop coins in the donation box for candles
to bow their small blue heads in this divine atrium.
In the heart of the old world St. Peter’s knucklebone
is surrounded by a shroud of tourists
while saints with necks like llamas bestow secret
religious warfare in the symbols of the New World.
A day with you is like building a subway system
here in Rome—every few feet construction halted
for finding spooning skeletons or Latin graffiti on the bathhouse.
My many wishes and I—they are silver lariats.
Touch me in my nearest niche like you are a weary mystic
and I am a speaking tree. Abide our modern moods.
My thought of our possible future I keep like the pope’s
ill-gotten hoard where shine expounds shine in treasure crypt
(if gold speaks so it does in solemn curses). But I won’t
show you a peek until you anoint me with your god-look.
I don’t keep you, you keep me as history keeps
its judgement of the nefarious emperors.
Last night I dreamt again for the first time in a long time—
angels each with one blue crystal wing charging
across a dark field. I’m not an accountant for miracle:
if you were in that horde, you were of the horde.
Andy Butter lives and works in south Minneapolis and is a founding
editor of The Call Center Collective. Author of the chapbook To Circumambulate a Sacred Lake (Yo-Yo Labs @ Portable Press), his work has appeared in The Baffler, The Drift, Colorado Review, Passages North, Sierra, and elsewhere. He can be found online at andybutter.com.
