after Baudelaire
I am not trying to write
a poem about birds.
I am trying to write
a poem about that incandescent
weightlessness
we experience
when laying down
to sleep, to dream a false
dream in which I'm tying
a knot, not the knot—
not yet, not until I've earned
what little love
my life is worth.
I am trying to write
a poem in which no birds
appear, in which a cape
is all it takes to take
to the skies.
Superman, you think,
takes to the skies
trailed by a red cape,
& saves Lois Lane
from General Zod, Lex
Luthor, & Brainiac &
somehow she still doesn't see
he's just Clark Kent
without glasses, an alien
pantomiming back
what it means to be
human, to bleed that thin
strip of scarlet.
Maybe I can't write
a poem about flying
without considering
covert feathers stretching out
in radials, or the red
talons of raptors poised
to claim rabbits like tiny
wafers from green hands.
Maybe Superman
can't pretend to be a man without
pretending to be weak,
without stepping on his
glasses so he's un-
recognizable to the opposite
sex. That part
I'm reconciled to—I want men,
not women, to recognize me—
a fagellah. As a boy, my grandmother
would say—look at those
fagellahs prancing down the street,
though fagellah has nothing to do
with being a bundle of sticks,
a cocksucking heretic—
fagellah, a false cognate,
really means bird, really means
a small feathered thing
that flies when you throw it;
curves through the spokes
of the chest, through a gaggle
of handsome men walking,
their hands interlaced,
down Santa Monica pier.
Even if it's cliché, I want to be
a bird, unable to walk
the earth because my wings are
in the way.
Yet even with the stones
loose between my toes,
I've never been free, or any freer
than I am now watching
the 'w' unfold between
my lover's shoulders, the
'i-n-g' breaking like silt
on my tongue.
The metamorphosis is definite
the moment I find love
& wrapped like a knot around
his vowels. When he speaks
the creature
in my chest stirs
mightily & mad. This is love.
I'm tying the knot, writing
a letter to pin to his chest,
but the cupboard flaps open,
the creature flies away.
Again, I remember
this feeling isn't new.
The problem with wings
is knowing that
having them means
you can leave
whenever you want to—
& you will.
©
's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Third Coast, Boston Review, New Orleans Revie, and Best New Poets 2012, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from The Ohio State University, and currently resides in Seattle, WA.
Adkisson’s poem “In Ear & Ear” also appears in this issue.
