Excerpt from Except by Nature

BY THE NAPE

Though sun rubbed honey slow
down rose hips, the world lost
its tenderness. Nipple-haired, joint-swollen,
the grasses waved for attention.
I wanted a watery demonstration for love,
more than wingpaper, twisted stalk of heartleaf.
Squalls rushed over pearling the world,
enlarging the smallest gesture, as I waited
for a drake in first winter plumage
to stretch his neck, utter a grunt whistle,
begin his ritualized display.
I'd held a wild mallard in my palm,
hoodlum heart whooping like a blood balloon.
I'd watched a woman suck coins
between her thighs and up inside her body.
How long she must have trained to let the cold world
enter so. The old man said his neighbor asked him
to milk her breasts, spray the walls, bathe in it.
That was his idea of paradise.
Sometimes I don't know who I am—
my age, my sex, my species—
only that I am an animal who will love
and die, and the soft plumage of another body
gives me pleasure, as I listen for the bubbling
and drumming, the exaggerated drinking
of a lover rising vertically from the sedges
to expose the violet streaks inside his body,
the vulnerable question of a nape.
 
SWEAT

Friday night I entered a dark corridor
rode to the upper floors with men who filled
the stainless elevator with their smell.

Did you ever make a crystal garden, pour salt
into water, keep pouring until nothing more dissolved?
A landscape will bloom in that saturation.

My daddy's body shop floats to the surface
like a submarine. Men with nibblers and tin snips
buffing skins, sanding curves under clamp lights.

I grew up curled in the window of a 300 SL
Gullwing, while men glided on their backs
through oily rainbows below me.

They torqued lugnuts, flipped fag ends
into gravel. Our torch song
had one refrain-oh the pain of loving you.

Friday nights they'd line the shop sink, naked
to the waist, scour down with Ajax, spray water
across their necks and up into their armpits.

Babies have been conceived on sweat alone—
the buttery scent of a woman's breast,
the cumin of a man. From the briny odor

of black lunch boxes-cold cuts, pickles,
waxed paper-my girl flesh grows.
From the raunchy fume of strangers.
 
IN THE JITTERING WORLD

I carry a chameleon in a glass as if he were wild game.
I herd him from the oak floor
where he mimics the grain
toward the living room
to bathe in a saucer of brown water
under the ficus tree. He climbs the plum sofa and lies
under my reading lamp. Slowly he warms himself.
Slowly we warm together—oh the fine intellect of winter.
No antelope would sit so still
content to glow against fuschia pillows
blinking from rouge to green with no nervous movement,
no perceptible throb in his throat.

In a world jittering with possibility,
how did I come to this sour basement
in a Southern city to grade rhetoric,
water dripping all day down drainpipes,
and at night for recreation,
to nurse a lizard? I love his sticky toe pads,
the way he rests
between death and life, leaf-veined, reflective.
Carefully he picks across the blue carpet, as if
it were a globe laid flat.
Perhaps we both are lost in our landscape,
woman and chameleon always changing to save our skin.

I toss down a piece of butter lettuce which rocks on the carpet
like a pallid sail.
Might he be melancholy?
Can iguanas experience
the macabre, uncanny?
I make what offering I can. I leave on the incandescent lamp
when I go to bed, for this fawn-spotted scholar,
this saturnine antelope
settling against the sofa cushions, the only beacons
flicking in a cool dendritic body—his bulging eyes
aquatic, otherworldly
slow like mine.

Copyright 1998 by Sandra Alcosser. All rights reserved.