- Natalie Diaz
ARAR
These Hands, If Not Gods
Natalie Diaz
Haven’t they moved like rivers—
like glory, like light—
over the seven days of your body?
And wasn’t that good?
Them at your hips—
isn’t this what God felt when he pressed together
the first Beloved: Everything.
Fever. Vapor. Atman. Pulsus.
Finally, a sin worth hurting for, a fervor,
a sweet—You are mine.
It is hard not to have faith in this:
from the blue-brown clay of night
these two potters crushed and smoothed you
into being—grind, then curve—built your form up—
atlas of bone, fields of muscle,
one breast a fig tree, the other a nightingale,
both morning and evening.
O, the beautiful making they do,
of trigger and carve, suffering and stars.
Aren’t they, too, the carpenters
of your small church? Have they not burned
on the altar of your belly, eaten the bread
of your thighs, broke you to wine, to ichor,
to nectareous feast?
Haven’t they riveted your wrists, haven’t they
had you at your knees?
And when these hands touched your throat,
showed you how to take the apple and the rib,
how to slip a thumb into your mouth and taste it all,
didn’t you sing out their ninety-nine names—
Zahir, Aleph, hands-times-seven,
Sphinx, Leonids, locomotura,
Rubidium, August, and September—
and when you cried out, O, Prometheans,
didn’t they bring fire?
These hands, if not gods, then why
when you have come to me, and I have returned you
to that from which you came—white mud, mica, mineral, salt—
why then do you whisper, O, my Hecatonchire. My Centimani.
My Hndred-Handed One?
JOHN
I'm just trying to figure out if I can trust him.
ZOE
If you have to ask the question, then you already know the answer.
Laterns, S01E02
To the One Who is Reading Me
Jorge Luis Borges
You are invulnerable. Didn’t they deliver
(those forces that control your destiny)
the certainty of dust? Couldn’t it be
your irreversible time is that river
in whose bright mirror Heraclitus read
his brevity? A marble slab is saved
for you, one you won’t read, already graved
with city, epitaph, dates of the dead.
And other men are also dreams of time,
not hardened bronze, purified gold. They’re dust
like you; the universe is Proteus.
Shadow, you’ll travel to what waits ahead,
the fatal shadow waiting at the rim.
Know this: in some way you’re already dead.
Hell
Billy Collins
I have a feeling that it is much worse
than shopping for a mattress at a mall,
of greater duration without question,
and there is no random pitchforking here,
no licking flames to fear,
only this cavernous store with its maze of bedding.
Yet wandering past the jovial kings,
the more sensible queens,
and the cheerless singles
no satin sheet will ever cover,
I am thinking of a passage from the Inferno,
which I could fully bring to mind
and recite in English or even Italian
if the salesman who has been following us—
a crumpled pack of Newports
visible in the pocket of his short sleeve shirt—
would stop insisting for a moment
that we test this one, then this softer one,
which we do by lying down side by side,
arms rigid, figures on a tomb,
powerless to imagine what it would be like
to sleep or love this way
under the punishing rows of fluorescent lights,
which Dante would have surely included
had he lain on his back between us here today.
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