Two Poems

Abstract

Two Poems J. P. Grasser (bio) Wild Thought Animals are good to think with. — Claude Lévi-Strauss I want to regress to the old way of thought,not a mode, but a graveled road, a path out of reason. I want to invest in a vestigial tailthat wraps my fat ankle like the very manacle of leaving. I want to maul the idea of progress,claw it to ribbons and leave it on your back step — I love you that much.Don’t you see? My rainbow trout cascade like your dementia; my grasshoppers flitthrough acres and acres of shedding skin. Like my pheasants in fall,grief flushes, and you, restive in sleep, chew your own tongue. Don’t you see?I want to gallop backward onto the stage [End Page 651] of evolution, scamper up its curtains, look downunafraid, then plunge after anything that gleams. I want to unfold the foldsin my brain until my eyes reflect light and darkness (what you left) seems not unnamable,but unnamed to begin with. [End Page 652] Lesson In Winter The Sandhills were fixed in ice.The buckwheat chaffs looked breakable, like the fletching of a glass arrowor a mouse’s contorted skeleton, housed within an owl pellet. The night before,we caught a possum in a plastic bucket, under the house’s cement foundation.The foundation was cracked from years of scale and thaw. Aunt Carol handed me your .22,so I put a bullet behind its ear, then cleaned the gun. I used solvent and a swatch of linen,just how you showed me that summer. Because the world was so bright,we were late to your funeral. We kept running off the road. When the possum thawed,and mealworms ate their way out, I looked through the window they’d openedin its gut and a litter looked placidly back. [End Page 653] J. P. Grasser J. P. Grasser is a current Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Utah, where he serves as editor-in-chief of Quarterly West. “Wild Thought” owes a debt to professor Chris McDonough. Copyright © 2018 The University of the South