New Poem

Amanita Verna, The Death Angel mushroom 

The Road to Heaven

This body has torqued to another shape

than the woman's that I knew.   It ships in water, 

it is rudderless, without a keel  

So that it is not even a sea-worthy craft. It is waking as pain

incarnate, a thin stream of fire from the small of the back,

down the leg, someone else's dark dream writing itself on my bones

like Christ's side-wound in the painting in the Prado--

A  wound that leached down his white belly, under the cloth:

sacred blood.  Secret fire. 

I befriend the pain, lifting my leg high up in the night
like a tree, a ghost of flesh and tendon and bone

by the flickering light of the news of the terrorist compound ,

I catch a glimpse of the bodies there, in the contorted code

of death, lips blue and thick, seas of blood behind the heads

cloying.

And then, rage at the indifferent others. Jihadist blood congeals

like tar: perhaps the blood of betrayal is darker, like Gulf oil

suffocating the tortoise, the pelican. In the channels of pain,

the burning in the marrow, the body folds itself up

Like the amanita verna in the forest,

the death angel mushrooms of our souls sprouting in the loam

we shrink back, like a shroud in the shadows.

And if we are out of reprieves, out of the postulated

matin of the rip cord kicking in at the last moment, give me

a good goodnight... rock me in morphine's arms,

a nun in murmuring solicitous nearness, like a mother.

My father whispered on the telephone that he couldn't go on

and that night I took his breath, thimbles of it.  At last,

the dark sputum in the blue porcelain sink, the working gills

of the spent man hunched over the counter-- occluded.

And I leave you to plant strawberries in the arid ground,

to battle the garrisons of mustard weed choking the garden.

To watch the erupting blue channels in the flesh

little semaphores in a tunnel of fading light: look closely-- this way. 

Come with me, this way.

cc

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011