Bruce Beasley - The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems

THE PACIFIC NORTHWESTPOETRY SERIES Linda Bierds / General EditorTHE PACIFIC NORTHWESTPOETRY SERIES2001 John Haines For the Centurys End2002 Suzanne Paola The Lives of the Saints2003 David Biespiel Wild Civility2004 Christopher Howell Lights Ladder2005 Katrina Roberts The Quick2006 Bruce Beasley The Corpse Flower

NEW AND SELECTED POEMS BRUCE BEASLEY UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS SEATTLE & LONDONThe Corpse Flower, the sixth volume in the
Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, is published with
the generous support of Cynthia Lovelace Sears. 2007 by the University of Washington Press Designed by Audrey Seretha Meyer
12 11 10 09 08 07 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. University of Washington Press
P.O. Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98145
www.washington.edu/uwpress Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beasley, Bruce, 1958
The corpse flower : new and selected poems / Bruce Beasley.
p. (The Pacific Northwest poetry series)
ISBN 0-295-98638-7 (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-295-98639-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. Title. II. II.

Series.
PS3552.E1748C67 2006
811'.54dc22 2006015768 The paper used in this publication is acid-free and 90 percent recycled from at least 50 percent post-consumer waste. It meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. For Susanne and JinJesus said: He who has known the world has found a corpse; and he who has found a corpse, the world is not worthy of him.
The Gospel of Thomas Why do you seek the living among the dead? Why do you mourn the incorrupt amid corruption?
Orthodox Easter liturgy

from Spirituals (1988), The Creation (1994), and Summer Mystagogia (1996) forerunnerThats where your fatherhad his accident, my father mumbled, pointing through the cracked windshield to the dropoff where hed plunged that car into spiky shrubs thirty feet below. But I knew anyway from my mothers enraged voice on the phone, then from the barred psychiatric ward, it was no accident. That gesturehis finger tracing vaguely all he couldnt talk about comes back to me now, through Caravaggio, where Christ guides the apostles pointing finger with sexual tenderness into the smooth, apparently permanent gash in his breast. Through his one sentence, my fathers voice was rough with such regret for having tried, or having failed, I couldnt tell I only knew his scarred arm on the steering wheel scared me, and his sweet whiskey breath, and the broken guardrail stabbing its twisted metal over the skidmarks still there down the edge...

I thought: he must have tried to make it stop. But I didnt want to know, didnt want to watch his headlights scoop out that canyon or the darkness fill it back up, or his lips, lit by a cigarette stub, try to tell me what had gone wrong and I didnt say a thing as he twisted the radio dial from gospel to Muzak to static, coughed his dry, frightened cough and watched me from the side of his eye. The torn seat squeaking on its hinges was the only sound as we rumbled down the brick streets of Macon where I watched his back disappear through glass doors throbbing with dancing bottles.

In Caravaggios painting, the voyeur apostles throng so close around Jesus and Thomas, gazing hard as the fingertip slips into the pucker of wound. They all want to know what its like inside the cut, risen body, but theyre scared of what the touch might do; its assuring to watch the curious one penetrate first. But Thomas is tense, his forehead ridged, his throat tight as he goes deeper into the fresh opening just under the skin hes mortified, like one admitted where he can never belong.

Still, Caravaggio has torn the shoulder seam on his red robe, which means hes as human as Christ, available to damage too. My father died a year after that ride, and now I dont even know where the road he showed me is. At fourteen, I closed my eyes and let his old Nova carry me home, the Ocmulgee Rivers smell of mud-clogged kudzu and swampgrass washing over my fathers Jack Daniels. He turns back to me now, when I want him to, lifts his shaking hand to the window, and points again down the cliff, and the flesh colored robe opens, and the finger pierces just under the heart, and the hand with its nailhole coaxes the bewildered witness in.

We lay a long time in the brine of my blood, Father, this other hacked from my flesh, her side by my gashed side. Strangers How fitfully we slept like that, her hair sponging the long cut just under my throat.

We didnt speak, falling asleep, waking each other in starts both feverish. Once I dreamed You were calling and calling and I couldnt answer, something caught deep on my tongue. It was days before we could eat; I split a lopsided fruit and squeezed the juice from its hundred scarlet seeds into her mouth Thats all she could take. So weak, after being crushed into life in Your hands... I never asked for another, didnt know what to say to her, what to do the first three days we just gazed, not talking, over the east side of the hill where you can see all four of the rivers slipping away from the garden (where do they go?)I laid my head in her lap and she hummed, and the sun poured itself into the slow-moving water. We watched three horned birds Id never named spiral above us, black-winged and beaked, red-eyed Her skin and mine both stained, and our hair like the sky, a red wed never seen, and the birds splayed their wings and tilted above us in rings, circling down to the bloody mulch of fig leaves where we kneeled...

My Father, I never thought either of us would heal

A world already deposed in the urge of his stressed consonants, vowels slack: mood and doom and mudsink, logbridge and pear, the gouge of the creek, hunched leaves For days I called him I, called the root in his fist water, called what fire does bathe Hed close me for hours in the rivercliff cave, to make me remember, then hed teach me a name for that: alone. Alone, I practiced the unnatural sounds, touching my lips as he did, feeling air move through my throat, my chest, letting it stay there. Then sometimes the hush, the thrill of seeing things he hadnt claimed yet with his tongue: once I woke, wet, hands muddy, to something quick and burning cutting through the trees. And pieces of river clinging to the spiderswings between the crimped, rough applelimbs: I would have kept that as it was, tangible, alien, let the memory swell, unsayable and I stared at him refusing words when he came to rescue me and teach me rain and lightning. But some things I kept as my own: the hurt low in my body he knew nothing of. I came to like it.

And my own name for the land, not a sound, nothing any body could reproduce... He wanted everything common, so we could

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