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Art Allen
Winter 2017 * Homecoming / Epithalamion
I Knocking on this door again, I feel as if I’m drumming on my own chest and hearing the rattle of something impaired. Everything I feel feels inauthentic or ill-formed. I overtook him without knowing and I who was always a mourner for hire am self-employed. Grief like ecstasy cramps my arm and every suit on the central line outlives him with every wheeze and tremble. II She was sitting gently sinking without sinking in the pleated light on half their bed. I saw my mother in the clutch of scented orchids wearing her wedding ring like a trance. Her joy broken for keeps, a sob breaking like a small bone in her throat. I was a child peering at the bedroom door, I don’t lose sleep over the mercy of God. She is in love, he is preserved in love. * Augury I can see him moving as a bird alone in anonymous rain forewarned by blood like every migratory thing and gone in wind, in perdu, insignificantly battered but I think his jaw was wired and what arterial embalming lent in tensile strength to his taut veins I could not see. Disinfected, opened and pinned as a pair of wings he suffered four gloved hands massaging his muscle’s plumes to relieve the rigor mortis. I was upright looking down at him, slumped under bruises like hoofprints when I delivered to the undertaker what clothes we chose to be exalted. Denim on fire. And skin and hair. Flesh to tallow sliding into burning water. Fire flensed the intimate random plan of his person, the world deferred and his jawbone fell away like sugar. No grave-land crows, no ossifragae will come to tear fresh soil’s knots. I do not know the portent of the pitch or direction of song, I do not the know hierarchy of signs. I know the sky was divided into four and he was not softly lost and it does not look like a man asleep. His mortified surface lay down pale and unlike itself, absent and so unlike himself. A desolated thing, his beauty broken down. He’d just started to like my sinning. What can I possibly say. All other thoughts have quit, I’m begging this feeling like a hummingbird: don’t fly away. * |
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Art Allen is a young poet originally from Kochi, now living and studying for a PhD at the University of Oxford. His poetry has previously appeared and is forthcoming in a number of national and international magazines including; The Irish Literary Review, The Amsterdam Quarterly, Wilderness House, The Oxfonian Review, The Cadaverine, IS&T, Cake and Elbow Room.
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