Pizzle
Words, we’re told, are ours to own once we’ve known
them three completely independent times – listen:
the first time is a wash an auditory wash maybe an
eyecup wash how the whole bowl is closed over
the hollow & the offense is coaxed & cajoled &
hopefully wholly until finally the tiniest of piece
is rivered away and what remains is stored away.
Today is a birthday of a man I was once married
to a man I took to & should not have but I did, I had no
eyecup I had no hearing aid I only had my naivete
I had nothing else I went out into the weather
of it unprepared & he opened my coat in a blizzard
& I froze to death there. No not to death but he
bent me and I broke against his heel. Struck,
he walked off while I cradled my remains.
Today, the word I read in two different places two
different genres – one Drunk on Genocide and one
“The Weavers” – a poem, I didn’t expect it in
the poem but I did in the description of whips used by
the Nazis – tell me: who but some kind of sadist
makes a dick into a whip?
It’s got to be some kind of
coincidence, reading this on his birthday, and all this
time having gone by without so much as being
in the same town or a city or even sometimes a country
this past quarter of a century.
Some comfort must be taken, by force if needs be,
for letting a thumb of a different lover stumble and
hover above that scar in the dark, & then, because
edges are made to either be stepped back from or jumped
off of, choosing the nudge, the lift of the hip
where in the clavicle of the bone, where the hurt has been
nurtured to the nerve, and choose, when the sounding
abates into the distance, give it over, give it entirely
over and be talked toward from the reverberating crack.
