THREE POEMS

Mélange

The village’s sausage specialtywas pork and chicken groundas fine as a mist—or sometimeschicken and mollusc,maybe beef and shad, or—they could sometimes find a talonor a beak in the mix,like punctuation. And sothese were something like mythological creatures,a griffin, a centaur:more than one,in one.It reminds me of what I’ve readabout the shoddier mummificationsin ancient Egypt: occasional bonesof birds, ofwere added in, to help out, clumsily, whena human part went missing: presumablysometimes someone woke upin the Fields of Everlasting with an armand, on her other side, in an uneasy balance,a wing. She might consider herselfa slightly third-rate versionof the gods—those lovely human bodies,male and female both, but with the headsof hawks or ibises or lions, with the aspectof the ape, the hippopotamus, the scorpion.And when I think, too,of the many generations of consistencywith which that village served upthose melange-ingredients sausagesat ceremonial feasts, I have to believethey were intended—at least originally—tobe a reminder, a symbol, of howthe wedding bed is also the salty arithmeticof 1 + 1 = l; how Jesus isthe great incinerating wrath of the tigerand, equally, the mildturned cheek of the lamb. If “sausage”stands for “symbiosis,” then it’s everywherefrom our guts to our graves—bacteriawill vouch for that, ditto the maggot—althoughmy favorite example this weekis the umber and buff-tone Cypriot vasefrom the 13th century B.C., with(in simple but elegant silhouette)“a bird removing a tick from a bull’s neck”;charmingly, the bull inclines its headin a bow, as you might for your barber or beautician,to provide an easier access. Bull and tick,then bull and bird—it’s a triangulatedsymbiosis, done up as a single,sinuous, almost abstract design.But Albert, it’s not only beasts—for example,wheat is alive. Well, yes; I’ve read a bookthat basically posits wheat used us—that it manipulated us—into domesticating it, tending itinto a healthier thriving. Isn’t the giantplastic chicken holding a shock of wheatin its humanish hands (and sometimes dancing)on the roof of Chicken-n-Biscuit Innanother example the villagers I began this withwould recognize? I’m not sure. And you,—you, reading this—and me; anotherexample? What I am sure of,having shared it with you, is howthere are mornings, wakings-up,when a gossamer web of dream still clingsto your brain, still wants to claim you,and you look down to the arms at your sidesor across your chest in a sad, confuseduncertainty… for a momentyou were sure you could fly.