Winner of the 2022 Test Site Poetry Series for his book The Dove of the Morning News
Imperium
When I was small, I drew small people and gave to each the life
of the others, the sense of a solitary shared self that many make,
when gods above them flip the pages. I was learning how to think
of others when they are far away, to lay down a sketchpad of faces
in incremental variations, the closer the semblance of the moments
the stronger the illusion, the more fluid the movement of the lips.
And once, when I was small, a mother stepped out of the paper,
out of the steady brokenness that gives to each a silent language.
*
I was learning how to think of the self, not the self as the river I am
when I have yet to say river or self or I am learning how to think.
Not that kind but the chatter of a film projector, where I play a role,
a figure in an animated feature spooling in the basement of a brain.
The river you hear is no river, but the crackle of an old soundtrack.
Its crawl of fiction crumples as it turns. But the ache of light is real,
the way it suffers to be seen, heard, taken over. I think therefore I
fail the surplus of experience. The dark of whom is everything I love.
*
A child crawls in a hall with a mirror at the far end, and as the figure
in the mirror crawls a little closer, the child feels a little larger, darker.
With every move the child makes, so too the stranger whose shadow
trails into the hall in the mirror. If a shadow could stand, it would be
a monster. It would be a child who cries in pitches only dogs can hear.
And shiny objects with hearts of glass. And when the mirror shatters,
a monster would rise from the shards to see in them his brokenness.
He would kneel down like mist at dawn to give to each a child’s name.
*
Long ago, a flock of blackbirds flew into one man’s ear and turned
into a solitary figure. Blackbird, he whispered, and the bird flew away.
Just when he thought himself one of the family, he found his life
abandoned. When at last he woke, one of his eyes was gouged out.
Bird, he said, more bitterly this time. With every thought of the wound,
how it ate into the visual world, he saw the glossy jacket of the bird.
With every song, his blood turned cold. And when he woke again,
lo, his eye returned, but everything he dreamed was bitter and black.
*
Begin with a four-year-old who spins a dial, and the needle falls
on orange or green. Then a gift, a shirt in the corresponding color.
Now ask the child to read cartoon figures in the same two shades,
unscripted scenes whose silence summons the prejudice of being
one of the fold. That sideways glance. Is it conspiratorial or shy.
A shirt will tell you. Truth loves no one. But dread has favorites.
Its games are cruel. Its brain is a child inside a brain that watches.
Like a wilderness some call bankable or pointless. Others, home.
*
I met a squirrel who came to my window every morning to be fed,
and though I was never sure it was the same squirrel, I called him
squirrel and loved him all the same. Him and his schizophrenic
freeze-tag with voices in his head. The squirrel brain in me said,
Maybe you just love the love of squirrels, and it was true. My email
signature read, yada, yada, PhD, lover of squirrels. My motto was,
The good of the relation is something other than the good within it
A squirrel told me that.Take this, I said, a nut. Whoever you are.
*
Frankenstein the creature will tell you, the volt that shocks the dead
to life falls from clouds whose rage drifts in from the unseen story,
like a mob in the making, waiting to explode. He will tell you, he is
an animated figure, a lightning rod, a doll. Heaven strikes the nerve
of what the frightened call a monster, and his eyes in ours are ours
through which we see his father turn away. It will take a blind man
to read the stapled lesions in a startled face. The proximity of touch
will tell you. Forget what you heard. To relate belongs to one alone.
*
In Bagdad once, a Mongol herd rounded up the priests and scholars,
cut their throats, and hurled them in the Tigris. It turned the water
to rust, the widows to water, eyes downstream to the littered shore.
Then to make a bridge, the invaders dumped wagonloads of books
that stained the current black. When a violence spreads, it scatters
the remnants of erasure. It flows into gutters, trickles under homes.
scours faces of their features, out there, where the story ends and ends.
Above earth and below. The river affirms the terms of its surrender.
*
It’s alive, says the scientist whose unkempt hair stiffens into quills,
which tells you something is seriously wrong below, inside that head,
his pride afloat the danger music of his blood. It, the scientist says,
but what do we call the new human whose parts are old and aching.
If not Lamp of Knowledge, what. Mania, Regret, No Son of Mine.
No. The affair began with a fiction, but suffering is another matter,
and love needs a name. It needs a threshold, the way a hand needs
a shadow hand to lie down on, to press against the shadow of a face.
*
If you draw enough and talk and, in your talking, listen, you begin to light
the many apartments of a project on the margin. I too am worried, scared,
beaten by strangers I later punish in my dreams. I see in each the avatar
I cannot be, no stranger can, no tribe, no urchin who thinks in exaltations
of violence and cartoon. If, in some feature set inside a neighbor’s kitchen,
you dab her open wound with a cloth, you understand, as lesions must,
the primacy of touch, that place the tremor of the lidded eye subsides.
But you are in there still. Like a thousand dark apartments. Like blood.
*
The face of many is one face, its eyes sewn shut. Its mouth gagged.
Its suffering a string that gathers followers like crystals. I have seen it.
I have given the breath of a creature to whom the many are a stranger.
For though the face is blind, I see, in it, a mirror, the kind that calls
from the end of a long dark hall. Lonely as a monster or some such friend.
What I do not, cannot, know fills the pitchers of the grieved with blood.
And those who hang in the bayou break down into particles, frames, flies.
All night, they bronze the wind, they toll, waiting for the one to cut them down.
Bruce Bond is the author of thirty-two books including, most recently, Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave, 2019), Words Written Against the Walls of the City (LSU, 2019), Scar (Etruscan, 2020), Behemoth (New Criterion Prize, Criterion Books, 2021), The Calling (Parlor, 2021), Patmos (Juniper Prize, UMass, 2021), and Liberation of Dissonance (Nicholas Shaffner Award for Literature in Music, Schaffner Press, 2022). Forthcoming books include Invention of the Wilderness (LSU), Choreomania (Madhat), Therapon (co-authored with Dan Beachy-Quick, Tupelo), The Mirror, the Patch, the Telescope (co-authored with David Keplinger, MadHat), and Vault (Richard Snyder Prize, Ashland). His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including seven editions of Best American Poetry.