Читать книгу The Trailhead - Kerri Webster - Страница 10

THE NIGHT GROVE

The torturer wants to know

how one minute blood, one minute

snow. She wants the windows

closed. The draft. Light breaks

across his back.

She lets the torturer put his head in her hands.

Tells him about Flanders,

the speaking dead.

We are the Dead, they say.

Where snow falls

in the taxonomy of the greater and lesser

desires: it falls on the taxonomy. On the money

and on the torso. On the fur.

She tells the torturer:

first, for practice, they bayonetted

straw men. Missing their villages, winter

descending. And then

the soft flesh of stomachs

attached to bodies

tied to trees.

He says,

that is a very ancient story.

She says, Simon Peter stirred the fire. There

in his animal body.

Yes, he says. Breath milk-warm

on her neck.

She says, maybe this weekend

we could flay the flesh from your back.

When she takes him inside

and through her body, what

is expiated? Nothing

is expiated. She tells him

of the torturer’s horse.

He says: I was the horse and

I was his rider. She says:

and you were the body

quartered behind.

She says, some boys on the news

shot a swan.

She says, maybe you could start a book club

where you read about faith

systems. He stacks coins

on her belly

until it’s difficult to breathe.

Gethsemane was more than

a garden, she says. People that night

dreamt of you. He

is weeping again but also

erect again.

She says, the dead swan. Their

daddy’s rifle. Wings

eight feet wide.

“The way fear looks like anger in the animal’s

dark eye”

is one way to narrativize

the universe.

Go ahead, he says.

Why not.

She says, or maybe you could start a support group

where horses ride over

your bodies. Those who survive

get to attend the next meeting.

She twirls the hair on his stomach.

The way freezing persons recollect the snow is

they’re sitting in the motherfucking snow, the snow

is in their mouths and their eyes

are sealed by crystals.

What, then, of outliving?

Poppies are the flower of forgetting.

The old men outside the grocery store

pin one to his lapel.

She says, I want to hold those boys

close, and then

I want to shatter their finger bones.

See, he says?