Before You: Brief Eclipse
You don’t have to do a bloody thing
though it's all about you.
Only you have to move. You do.
You have to turn. You turn the same way
you’ve always turned, or at least since
your captivity: a carousel for your
master's dominion. And clouds,
undular mane, are both reins and preferred
choice of horse, whatever shade the wind spits:
of course a beryl male and his mare, though
who’s in front of whom is always
this gamble, is always his cocked
tail and the unplumbed frontispiece of sky —
not exotic along the wild flat grass-
land planes, where dust moats of lust
on the run are hoof and teeth and necks red
with acquiescence after fury. Does it
matter who chooses what back
to slide down onto, to wait
for the music the push the stiff
grip on the pole? And those beams
under the canopy, buckling (though no one
notices) under their unnumbered temple
years weight? It’s a real leap here
but remember Samson leaning against
the pillar, after his hair grew back, after
they’d taken his eyes, after they’d put him out
to stud? He’d be the prize on this carousel.
After the all night party, blind and tied
he’d lean and breathe and no one
believed he’d come back into his own. While
the thousand thousand thousand spit and mock
his cock and long ball sack (to provoke
their wives no doubt, who rode him, more
for the climb and slide, climb and slide)
(and the small consequence of sons) all along
those gawkers, a stroke
of luck they’re all here, look up at the broad
pavilion, how it must’ve seemed
as close as a moon could get, so close
it might, if the strings were plucked
in the right order and time, fall. The building up
to blue, the quick vein pulse and grit. And then.
And then all that ahhhhh ease
of letting go. All his weight against
the pillar, the slow shade going over
their faces the way clouds do all the night
and day, and will go all the way all the time
through, the ceiling—obviously too heavy
on its own, and every one of those clumsy drunks
looking up in awe, the blood still
pulsing off, the gourds and millet, the bladders
of wine caught, but not before they’ve gone
from tongue to tongue, each grape, each seed
safe in the stomach, in the womb of the wives
who stayed home, away from the soon to be,
but not yet, not yet, dead.
