Читать книгу How Festive the Ambulance - Kim Fu - Страница 11

Lifecycle of the Mole-Woman

I. Infancy as a human

I’ve seen this waist-high grass

and weeping tree before, in a drugstore frame

and a Bollywood movie, the trunk a pivot point

for coquettish hide-and-seek. On the cover

of Vanity Fair it had a swing,

just two ropes and a plank, a girl levitating

on the tip of her coccyx. Poofy virginal

white dress, elegant lipstick slash, Cubist chin,

she had it all. Someone proposed here,

votive candles in a heart, a flowered trellis;

it went viral on the internet and spawned

a thousand thousand proposals. Someone

has decided this is a place where no one

can be ugly, this lonely hillside that bears

but one tree, one strand of sweetgrass,

summer sun fixed at one low angle,

stuck like broken spotlight. The branches

ache to be free of their heavy greenery,

to winter for once. Shorn, fallen and bare.

II. A wedding

The gatekeeper for the mole people

peers at me over his pink nose, an intimate

bulb of mucus membrane, a mane of whiskers:

perceptive and multidirectional. I cite

my poor vision, hold my hands

in dirt-scoop formation, show off my nails,

grown long and hard and yellow

as curls of cold butter. A delicate

affectation, he says, but he steps aside.

The towers of their metropolis rise like

a dirt-castle sand castle, musty warm

from the inflamed earth. The black forest

of a black forest cake, spongy peat

that bounces back. They cannot look at each other.

Courtship is a blind forward groping.

The mole prince runs his translucent claws

down the useless heavy dimpled doughy

flesh of my backside, finds stubby legs

coated in velvet fur: we are in love. He tenderly

gouges out my eyes.

III. An empty nest

We rise from the burrow in spring,

me and my pups, old for mole children,

one month weaned and eager to tunnel

out on their own, a world of infinite depth

and possibility. In their bravado,

they forget oxygen; they’ll learn.

My prince makes his high-pitched yelps

elsewhere, flushing females out

from the solitary forgetting that makes up

the bulk of our days. Will I recognize the tree

by its roots? That terrible nexus

of too many kinds of beauty. Like Bugs Bunny,

I keep failing to make a left,

churning the Albuquerque sand

like a delusional gardener. I’m sure

the desert is pretty in its way.

IV. A retirement home

I meet a mermaid. We commiserate,

half-rodent to half-fish, as she hugs the shoreline

and I hover at the topsoil, border between

above ground and below. She says the rebellion

has come, describes the scene for the benefit

of my scooped-out darkness. The mole people

walk upright, she says, a spreading pestilence

that overturns crops and claims the upper kingdoms

as their own. The merfolk flop up on beaches,

undulate on unseen waves, raise tridents for war.

They won’t accept another treaty:

You may walk among us if you walk on swords,

if your feet bleed, and you dissolve to foam

when we tire of watching you dance.

I twitch my nose to and fro. I smell nothing.

Can’t an old mermatron dream? she laughs.

She strokes my downy back. She concedes,

no, we are staying in our place, as ever always.