Four Poems from Black Swan Theory

Abstract

Four Poems from Black Swan Theory Kyle Marbut (bio) The water I draw from the well may come up wine, but I still have to scrape my plates clean nightly like anyone else. Before every meal I swallow pictures of my mother at ever, at after, at rest. The hour, inconsistent. Caught dozing again in the light with a mouthful of what. Full sun fixed in nocturne, wreathed nightly in the galaxy arm. No moon. The only one I could tell is lost in the mirror. Her brow, my brow; my lid, her eye. [End Page 59] Sister, were we early. Sister, were we late. We lost every star to day, and another night is not promised. Once left, I spoke in our mother’s voice just to hear it. With your eyes closed, you would mistake me for her or any other god. I swallowed that tongue, another draught, moonshine cut with winterberry. What I crave more than death, numb lightning, candlelight infinite in parallel windows. If this voice were really hers, I would wish for a second, truer sun. [End Page 60] I’m through with amazement! I don’t mean to sound so sure, but the flowers are getting to me. One tree sheds its blossoms, another bursts open in its place. Long season of color so desperate for touch we don stripes and stroke from stamen to pistil. How to explain lack to such plenty. Mouthfuls of dead bees, sexless haze of slow ecodeath. Rabid hounds snap their jaws at low branches of dogwoods. Finches pluck weeping cherries bald en masse. Streets lined with Callery pears, fruitless and reeking of cum. The unbearable rain of petals. Close the blinds. A vision: petrified trunks shade a field aflame, smoke aglow in infinite sunset, lovers fossilized in ash. It’s useless to behold endings as if they have already happened. Doom, too, is a hunger. [End Page 61] Dressed in just your blue jockstrap, you come to me whirling through the graveyard. Bearing honeycomb and black lace veils, foam at the mouth. Not the moonlight but what’s beneath it makes the night real. If the moon is still there while I’m looking at you, I’ll summer away the midnights you, drunk on cosmos, called my name wrong. Sight is only a measure of distance. Through every window I spy you heaving secrets behind the sunflowers. Darling, don’t tell me you ate another star! You’ll spoil your winter. [End Page 62] Kyle Marbut KYLE MARBUT lives in Virginia. They wrote two chapbooks called Dawn Chorus Fascicle and Ecliptic Tongues. They have one more secret to tell. I dropped a mirror and reflected in the shards I split into a hundred eyes, and through them I saw that other world where my mother married a tree and birds could whisper facts and the grave was a door the rain walked through, and I knew it was all true there. That was before I had teeth. Now I only write about real life. Copyright © 2023 Wayne State University Press