Critique of a Sonnet as a Red-eyed Mongoose
I wanted to write a poem about a red-eyed mongoose
snapping the neck of an Indian Cobra,
a piece of writing one would expect to find, say,
in Kipling’s Jungle Books. Since I neither have
the patience, excellence of style, nor the clarity of
judgment to pull off such an autistic feat,
I’ve decided, then, to begin the poem
as if I were the mongoose herself—yes,
or possibly a grim derivative thereof—
and pretend I was being forced
(by hypertrophic powers not of this world)
to witness this battle proportionate
to the darkest matter of the deepest space:
I cultivate silence and stare down the serpent.
I am twelve pounds and far exceed,
in quickness of apperception, any human
three-pound brain. The cobra’s thinking (1)
is a convolvulus, so I increase my heat profile
by wagging my bushy tail and pump blood into it.
I beat like a newborn heart and speak with hennaed eyes
of the lightest Egyptian-red: “You see, because the neck is long
it snaps so easily.”
(1)
Grow numb with me in my attempt to feel
The use of sleep when peace cannot be found.
Distort yourself with silence—so that, drowned
By every pitch of what I mind as real,
You can preserve my thoughts—and your ordeal
(Still prone to my voice) will be forced to ground
The gestures of my speechless step. Resound
My faith in all the tracks you’ve failed to seal
And react—do not respond—to what I
(The echo of an enemy who’s dead)
Must say to pluck the vowels from your head,
Letting your friction flow through such a cry
That killing, in your fury, will be crossed,
As syllables are cured and silence lost.
Still Life with José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949)
There’s no quicker way to make a friend
than to buy him, or her, cocaine.
I think the sounds of a written language
(I want it to be Flemish), and I feel
all alone. Who’s to say that this,
an orangutan with a stump for a right arm
leaning on a copper beam for support
doesn’t mean anything to anyone? How can I conjecture,
rationally, that the most efficient way
to treat a brain tumor is to cut off
the head? Death isn’t loss of consciousness.
My father was a geographer but died
a public servant. He worked with warm marrow
for the Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitations. Urban planning
was his spiritual eunuch, i.e. Mongolian gymnasts
folding their hundred pound bodies
into their ten pound chests, fiercely wrenching
every inch—an apokatastasis—
were of greater value to him
than the Truth. I remember my father
holding his pleated forehead
against a red rug of auburn wires
and me mimicking his actions
of keeping the personal god
and the eternal conscience together.
We hungered air. My older brother
was strong. Stronger than Martin Luther’s God—
and a combat of horses. Stronger
than Reason telling me that Adam
(Adán) reads backwards as nothing (nada)
in Spanish. Stronger than blue Jews
and green Muslims and Intelligence
demanding: “To fuse me to Fantasy
you must destroy or pacify me.”
I buy strangers cocaine and store my dead
in detrimental compartments
because noses, in shooting black clods
of hospice and quinine into me,
become percussion locks to brains.
Father (and Brother), schizophrenics
who don’t medicate themselves
and write—or paint—are poets.
So take this tapeworm out of me
and hang me with it. I promise
that as I suffocate to death I’d watch it—
with brains…and heart…and lungs…and nerves—
evolve into a vertical animal. Or
until it shares a parallax with God,
and Satan, lamb, and human being
desire to harden the soles beneath their feet.
I want a pair of sharper hooves, and ask
that neither you, Father, nor you, Brother,
leave my side. I don’t know how to die,
but I can make human destiny kill me.
The tapeworm around my neck
is me lying: I never was a corrections officer
who got stabbed by prison inmates.
I tell people that so that they won’t know
I ran a straight razor across my body. Therefore,
my Father and Brother, two dead men,
are studies of the same hidalgo’s hands
pulling the Flemish word for seizure
through my nose and out my mouth—affectatie—
I may not see you, but both of you are here.
Discourse on the Inequality of Concussions
I
Babies born with cleft palates and clubfeet
are being disemboweled in The Republic.
Their bent foreheads, a salaried inertia
made spectacle through municipal auscultation,
are two bareknuckled boxers fighting
in the hot sun. The laurel I wear, though green,
II
hears velvet and cracks a Roman nose.
The facial anachronism is a feeling for…
I taste an unthinking impulse, it tastes like doxa—
that is, like apple and sky—my eyes water,
and I’m left with the simple colors of hematoma.
Blurred a knuckle slides all the way back
III
to the back of the hand. The pain strands itself
becoming a pilot whale beached on my wrist—
broken the knuckle lets go. My optic
nerves slingshot, and the cheekbones holding
my once globular eyeballs together
spill aqueous humor, releasing lateral rectus muscles
IV
like sharks’ jaws closing in on seal pup flesh,
clouding memory, collapsing a lung. I draw
in breath, and a lopsided mushroom, gray and hirsute,
vibrates. The mushroom bobs (it is a flying bat),
it grows into a floating kidney when and where
I throw my fists. Glimpsing—instead of honing in
V
on it—emaciates my index fingers. Sonar
picks up appendicitis…the marble torso
of a young Greek man, his androgyny hinting
at a flamingo standing on one twiggy leg,
its beak the ivory tusk of a poached rhinoceros…
The corpuscular face of a vampire. I bespatter
VI
brown leather sandals with kernelsized
bloodchunks, dust rises as my numbed skull
ricochets off the tarred ground. I know that of all
the sense organs the eye is the most heliocentric,
and that the sound of loose teeth applauding
in the hollow gourd that is my head
VII
is only medial rectus muscles spraying
the aquiline arabesque of an uppercut
onto the entire vitreous body (a pated maraca
peopling the plaza with my suspensory ligaments),
and not my thinking all m’s are really w’s
seeing their reflections in water. Catercornered
VIII
to the supple, oliveskinned body of a hetaera,
I feel that what connects the nose to the mouth
can’t but not connect the ear to the jaw.
My tongue flaps its caudal fin, mapping out
the topography of my head’s insides, figuring
my face like a bat’s. Obeying I now understand
IX
that every genitive and genitive phrase
worth ever imagining is my face seeing itself
as a Rorschach Inkblot Test. The first image:
a seagull tilting its head back to get a meal
of red salmon down its gullet. The second: you
(God) existing, revealing why and what
X
I am. The third: in thirty-six years my mother
bearing me and my two brothers. The fourth:
an equine’s nostril brewing hepatitis.
The fifth: me throwing myself upon a Damascus dagger.
The sixth: Rachel Spivack, a blonde
Jewish woman from Nostrand Av Brooklyn,
XI
rearranging the eyes of my quincunx.
The seventh: a child with Down Syndrome
crossing herself. The eighth: communism being
a popular fad during the Great Depression.
The ninth: me trying a piece of human flesh
for the last time. And the tenth image: you, Rachel,
XII
loving me with red lips. So please, Rachel, break
the silence of my monologue, take me away
from my feelingdeadisproofmybloodrunswarm and back
to when I saw you, craning your neck, writing green words
with green ink on a white pad, and thinking,
this woman has punctured the kumquats of my eyes.
Third World Masochist
If, according to Annemarie Schimmel,
Professor of Near Eastern Languages at Harvard University,
the Qur’an is phenomenologically seen
as Christ is to Christianity—
the former the Word become Book,
the latter the Word become Flesh—then I,
Sharif El Gammal-Ortiz, am the Word become Brother.
Let me not try to explain.
My older brother, Glenn, was shot dead
by a fourteen year old boy who wanted to rob his car
in Carolina, Puerto Rico on November 13, 1986.
He was nineteen and I was six at the time—
I witnessed the event.
Exactly a year ago from April 29, 2010
I rode the number six train on my way from Manhattan
to the Bronx. A gentleman, who was either Russian or Polish,
I couldn’t tell which, was sitting opposite me.
I noticed that when he turned his face
and showed me the right side of his head
he was missing an ear. He saw me staring at the scar tissue
where his right ear should’ve been
and purposely kept his head cocked to the right.
Get your fill, I heard the keloid say.
I felt ashamed—I was reliving Glenn’s murder,
and I hated the gentleman and the hole in his head.
I drink blue wine to sluice away the thought
that only God can properly say, “I.”
Is wishing to drown the gentleman with the missing right ear
equivalent to accomplishing the act itself, and does desire
warrant a reward even if it fails to be carried out
to fruition? Glenn’s book is untranslatable.
Glenn knew he was going to die young.
At nineteen he was a black belt in karate,
a junior doing a bachelor’s in prelaw,
and an assistant manager at a sporting goods store.
He was also very much in love with his girlfriend of five years, Larissa.
Glenn is and nothing is with him.
Anything that is, is, as it is in him.
When I was in the back seat of the car the afternoon Glenn died
I remember Glenn mounting a creature
larger than a donkey but smaller than a horse,
with long arms and legs and with the head of a woman.
My brother is a sustained gradual ascent,
and I see myself as a sad and lonely man.
What most people don’t understand is that the eagle
is a symbol for the first intelligence, the ringdove
a symbol for the universal soul, the phoenix
for prime matter, and the black crow
for the universal body. China
has already enslaved you, America, as it has me.
Glenn is me taking the word brother
to its full semantic range. I am his little brother—
the sensible clothing of his unintelligible discourse.
The journey Glenn made was outside himself
and yet it was toward himself that he was guided.
This is the last poem I, Sharif El Gammal-Ortiz,
will write as a third world masochist.
I have seen horrible things
and have wished on my fellow human beings much pain.
Like Glenn, I wish my equals were polarized without resolution.
Like Glenn, I wish we were all born circumcised.
