Sitting Isohydric Meditation

Abstract

Sitting Isohydric Meditation Brian Teare (bio) weather is water is one way to think about the season seizing the street tree another drought year measured in questions I asked the nurses who gently strapped me to the clang & throb inside the passing time the MRI ground into windows the doctor looked through to see my future I sit on the couch & watch the sparrows on the branches pant & puff their feathers a sort of solstice truce with the dry heat moving scorch from edge to stem on each leaf the heat’s so quiet it’s a kind of pain [End Page 61] nothing seems to soothe not even his damp armpit & its scent of moss soaked with rain woody sweet dear bacterial earth mouth my mouth opens onto & into his skin confusing outside inside me when we fuck we go deep mammal all fur & genital scent in my beard a soak of pheromones taut swollen erectile tissue & the swoon of adrenaline a chemical world that feels insular but is immersed in stimulus the way a magnetic field held my prone body whose protons aligned their axes & flipped their spins to allow radio waves through flesh made newly resonant I felt [End Page 62] removed from the world & cocooned in sound while the protons slowed & their spins flipped back radio signals that rendered image vertebral detail so precise it hurt to look at the bones as the doctor talked drought’s about being porous & storing water if you can’t travel to get it so some tree species close their stomata & wait for water the way maples do dying slowly from edges to center as a stress response it’s a real gamble to shut yourself up inside of yourself if I could I would stay as open as his face when I sit on his cock & he holds my hips & tilts himself up deeper [End Page 63] injury insists it remain hidden & grows its quota of pain from the bones the doctor showed me calcifications white as dry lichen leaching life from a lip of granite how to keep going into the quotient of future the bones divide inside me the incurable instance a given faultless or at fault I remain hidden how to keep going [End Page 64] Brian Teare Brian Teare is the author of five books, most recently Companion Grasses (Omnidawn, 2013), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Ahsahta, 2015). His sixth book, Doomstead Days, will be out from Nightboat Books in 2019. His honors include Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle Awards, and fellowships from the NEA, the Pew Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. An Associate Professor at Temple University, he lives in South Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books. Copyright © 2019 Middlebury College Publications