IMPLICATIONS FOR MODERN LIFE

The ham flowers have veins and are rimmed in rind, each petal a little meat sunset. I deny all connection with the ham flowers, the barge floating by loaded with lard, the white flagstones like platelets in the blood-red road. I’ll put the calves in coats so the ravens can’t gore them, bandage up the cut gate and when the wind rustles its muscles, I’ll gather the seeds and burn them. But then I see a horse lying on the side of the road and think You are sleeping, you are sleeping, I will make you be sleeping. But if I didn’t make the ham flowers, how can I make him get up? I made the ham flowers. Get up, dear animal. Here is your pasture flecked with pink, your oily river, your bleeding barn. Decide what to look at and how. If you lower your lashes, the blood looks like mud. If you stay, I will find you fresh hay.

THE FUTURE OF TERROR / 11

From the gable window, we shot
at what was left: gargoyles and garden gnomes.
I accidentally shot the generator
which would have been hard to gloss over
in a report except we weren’t writing reports
anymore. We ate our gruel and watched
the hail crush the hay we’d hoped to harvest.
I found a handkerchief drying on a hook
and without a hint of irony, pocketed it.
Here was my hypothesis: we were inextricably
fucked. We’d killed all the investors and all
the jesters just when we most needed humor
and invention. The lake breeze was lugubrious
at best, couldn’t lift the leaves. As the day lengthened,
we knew we’d reached the lattermost moment.
The airlift wasn’t on its way. Make-believe
was all I had left but I couldn’t help but see
there was no “we” – you were a mannequin
and I’d been flying solo. I thought about
how birds can turn around mid-air, how
the nudibranch has no notion it might need
a shell. Swell. I ate the last napoleon –
it said Onward! on the packaging.
There was one shot left in my rifle.
I polished my plimsolls.
I wrapped myself in a quilt.
So this is how you live in the present.

THE INVENTION OF LOVE

The cave woman and cave man lie side by side, each head filled with bright images the other can’t see. Even when they press their ears or mouths or noses together, the skull wall is still in the way. In one head there is a gazelle straining a pool with its bleeding hoof. In the other, a patchwork of faces and forest fastened together with thorns. They look at each other. Is that a world in the other’s brimming eye? No, just the cave reflected, cold and dark and home. They bump globes sadly. The gazelle is fading. The forest is just the forest outside. “I am hungry,” one gestures. “I am hungry too,” gestures the other.

From Modern Life. Copyright 2007 by Matthea Harvey. All rights reserved.