A Natural History

A Natural History Andrew Kozma & Michelle Schmidt

A Natural History Andrew Kozma & Michelle Schmidt

Blue Hour Press ď „ 2012

Blue Hour Press • 1526 Kentucky St • Lawrence KS 66044 www.bluehourpress.com • editor@bluehourpress.com © 2012 Andrew Kozma and Michelle Schmidt. All rights reserved.

Book design by Justin Runge.

Parts XVI & XVII previously appeared in Weave.

A Natural History Shall we read the story again from the beginning? It will be no different.  Hans Christian Andersen, “The Snail and the Rosebush”

Part I First, define read. Then different.

Start from the beginning, but realize there is no beginning. You walk back through your footsteps, and find yourself at your origin, everything exactly as you thought you remembered it.

Read yourself into the future.

You are no different. This is hope or cynicism. There is room in your philosophy for nothing you have not placed there.

From the bag of grass seed, grass sprouts.

So do weeds, and they glory in their color.

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then, after all, little by little, it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables. ď „ Gertrude Stein

Part II In the beginning, there was a promise.

Observe the loving curve of the tomato, firm yet giving, red set flush with the sunset sky. The urge to pluck, little by little, lifts the tongue the moon glows large and orange and life and death pause: an apron held bowed between clenched hands.

Seeds quiver and hesitate the throat.

In the distance: a white picket fence, a crow caws, yawning its wings.

The cold dirt envelopes expectation.

How can a watched blossom bloom?

A Natural History

Part II He sneaks into the public park, cleaves a lock, cuts a fence, and the deer advances, its hungry tongue a bed for sugar. A kitchen knife stains the ground a butcher’s block.

The night thirsts for every sound.

Soon, dawn will erode the chill and flies will roost their melody around the deer, their marriage bed.

It takes long hours and dedication to remove us from our reservations.

Maggots grow the headless deer’s head.

Part III She writes a eulogy for the disembodied, turns down the sheets, rests her head, and dreams of tornadoes. She has this dream often. This time, there is no siren.

She opens the front door and holds on to the frame, her body pulling away from her.

There is no sound, no breath, nothing.

She wakes to glass shattering.

In the kitchen: milk on the tile, a cat licking its paws. Outside: a shovel, a pile of dirt. Placing her forehead against the cool of the window, she wonders where she put the broom.

A Natural History

Part III I see the holy and so cut it from the body for its purity. A heart in the hand is worth nothing, but two in the bush is evidence. What weighs on the soul also weights the body.

We are beasts aglow with creation, pain’s gift unto this nerveless world.

The new grass begs you to crush it. Exactly that twist of the heel on the snake’s head and how its body writhes in pleasure.

Who’s to say? They weigh the body after death to measure what has left.

Part IV Bales of hay monument the landscape, organized ruins of another man’s labor gathered at the moment between arrival and departure. A second look at pain finds us staring down the barrel in anticipation of the possible inevitable. In the horizon: a pregnant sky releasing its prophecy upon a town hundreds of miles away.

We are in a constant state of preparation and reparation, the heart beating or not regardless of expectation.

A Natural History

Part IV Jarrell says A person is a process, one that leads to death. And breath is another transformation – but stop, there’s no room in your philosophy.

The smoke of burnt meat in the air.

My clothes have a long memory for smells and touch, the grip of your arms a shell around my waist. You have a name but it eludes me. I just want to talk about your careful step on the stairs.

Your voice slips from the air, and your lips evolve stark intelligence.

Part V An end is a concept, one which marks transformation: a window opens, a worm is plucked from the dirt, a tea kettle whistles, a broom gathers broken glass. Death, however absent from the scene, gazes upon life, listens for something worthy of repetition. She has been shoveling for weeks, burying and unburying books of various virtue.

She studies the way her marginalia frays, the pages tatter, how words, phrases, entire passages disappear. At day’s end, she sifts her hands through the dirt, recovering what she can.

A Natural History

Part V If they left you here, I think it’s strange you left me. This thicket of technology has thorns the size of radio waves and a million princes caged inside.

Naturally, the world’s a bore so spear it until it dies. Take this as advice: Let your arms slip from your sides.

You told me I would never be ready.

Your tongue garnishes my ear, and tongues were made for nothing but lies. No door steps you out of your body, though even Achilles had an escape plan.

Part VI She knows her martyrdom is fragile, resting her redemption on the transformation of echoes – a lipstick kiss on a million graves. The will to rise each morning necessitates doubt. It is not the tongue that lies, but the ear. She abandons the garden, familiar with irony, each harvest a poorer translation than the one before. What is she holding out for? death wonders, the garden is after all, just what it can be, though certainty is its own escape plan.

A Natural History

Part VI I have a tongue. You have a heart.

How fortunate those evolution favors.

A wart, a callus, a freckle, a scar, all witness experience, but not growth.

The scalpel is a tool for revolution against nature. I long to erase the desire to erase what my body has seen.

Rain changes the landscape, but scrubs clean the concrete. A dead body picked clean in the jungle. In the city it rots to pieces. Those pieces fill the gutters.

This is no puzzle. There is no puzzle.

Part VII Upon dissection, the landscape and the body have much in common: a surface and a surface and a surface.

This one a branch, this one a limb.

Where there are pieces there is a want for needle and thread and a way for seeing.

Sometimes from the dirt will grow gardens, depending on what is buried and the weathering and the tender, whether watched or watching, will still make sense. As asymmetry is revolution against beauty, so too the roast beef.

A Natural History

Part VII Wine stains the white table red.

A frantic bleaching but no, no, you’ve born a ghost, a ghost that bleeds into the house around you, the walls taking the stain as skin takes a scar.

The sad truth: none of this is yours.

What’s given to you remains given.

Open the door and leave your shell but your back still holds its shape.

The dog you hit left your car unharmed.

Under your caress it stops its breathing.

Now that you’ve changed, can you prove who you are?

Part VIII She considers how the ground buries itself, layer upon layer, keeping the past in its hiding. The shovel, a tool for revision, unearths old roots, lovers, builds up dirt cities. What are ghosts but subplots and side stories unrequited by the authors of time? Each revolution of unburial releases modern ghosts, reveals novel histories. The names of saviors and foes worn thin, seen through, as a page smoothed by many hands. All being given, nothing is lost. Instead, another garden.

A Natural History

Part VIII Love is in the air, so hold your breath, cover your mouth, slight everyone around you. How long can you hold hands before your skin forgets what it’s touching? You’re left a monument in semblance of life.

And this drug in the air sleeps for years in the blood. It checks your loneliness, sets the metronome of your heart.

Your child is the fist with which you beat the world. Inhale. Then fold your hand.

Stay with the one you say you love.

Part IX An inventor is a prisoner of her own device.

Misuse, the only means of escape. To hold back the knife she would use to cut clean the hands necessitates a strong arm and a kept heart. How long before semblance destroys its resembled? Metaphors are bound to loneliness the way longing remains in the hollow of a held breath or in the tiny fist of an apple core. As shadows grow between words, bleed across surfaces, lines revolve and the sun, heavy with days’ past slows the eager metronome.

A Natural History

Part IX Don’t look now, but you are guilty for having already looked. History is created with an acknowledgment of the past and our place in it.

I turned the lock, and locked you out.

Fully enclosed, you’ll find the darkness to which your eyes will never adjust.

I’m sorry, this is philosophy and not bread, not water, just words to fill your mouth, to hone your body until it cuts you free of desire.

Vestigial mouth. Terrible rapture.

Part X She takes the recovered and places them on the page. This stone a comma, this dirt a verb. The story they tell is no different. She closes her eyes and considers the darkness between pages, the rising suffocation as they pile one on top of the other and the weight of what was outweighs what is left to be. Outside the door a murder of crows mistakes littered words for bread crumbs. When they caw, sand pours from their beaks.

A Natural History

Part X There is only so much light.

Without you there is an absence.

Half-lives are just one form of decay.

Infinity less one is still infinite.

With you there is the prospect of loss.

The sun has only so much fuel.

Please, please, don’t touch me like that.

You hit the cat for clawing the chair.

I close my eyes to practice forgetting.

Bet or don’t bet, the risk is the same.

Wake up: Dreams are the ghosts of desire.

But still it rubs against your legs.

Part XI A scientist is not a mad scientist until she has broken a piece of her self, shared it, watched it die. The endless experiments to resuscitate life where it exists no longer. The inability to accept dream nor memory as a satisfying effigy for reality. The blindness with which she sees the rest of existence. This is madness.

Romanticism. If time is a construct of man, then any machine built to travel through time may travel through the time of man alone. We are the bastards of invention.

A Natural History

Part XI Darwin had grand plans for us: microbe to ape to man to more than you can possibly imagine!

That’s a bit grandiose, I admit, but to what’s under the microscope we’re gods, and that’s the point, isn’t it?

Ah, but you’re made up of organs, and organs are conspiracies of cells, and cells are small enclosures that hold the smallest fractions of who you are.

At any moment, scientists suggest, we could fall apart. Here is the key.

Part XII

Fully enclosed in darkness one cannot see unless spoken. What is a lock but a memory of loss?

To speak is to admit the air in which words suspend, to admit a reliance on gravity. A key seeks an answer to a question of understanding. That sound escapes even from vacuums in space suggests that before sight there were sighs. To knock is to admit a lock, beg the question.

A Natural History

Part XII The ultimate expression of love is careful analysis. Realize there’s little difference between love and fear, and that histories of both tell us only what we want to hear.

I love you. I have always loved you.

I do not fear you. I have never loved you. This door has a strong lock on the outside. One of us locks the other inside. If you have a heart you will never understand. A heart has no mouth. Inside, there’s limited air.

Part XIII She sits at a table whose head she cannot see, feet dangling from a chair. The sound of plucked feathers scratches the walls. We all show up someday, we might as well empty the heart, boil water for tea, gather the ashes.

The tone here is conversational a place where she feels her hands melt to her sides, her mouth exiting the air though there is none, waiting for the door to open, each word pulling her farther from transformation.

A Natural History

Part XIII The birds watch over the ground. They fail every test for compassion. The dog bites two fingers from the hand that feeds it. The snake, at least, rattles to warn you away. The man outside the bar crouches against the wall.

He is everything he owns.

In this city, the birds litter the ground with their bodies. The sun is not a witness, but it bears down a judgment of your body’s water: salty, filthy, and unfit to drink.

Part XIV To wake, at least, proves a pulse.

In every chorus of creaking floor boards there is both uneasiness and relief. I am not alone but I know not with whom I am. Through walls the muffled melody of conversation

the tick-tock of a father’s clock the smell of last night’s dinner invite normalcy, ask the witness to put away discordant desires for a time. When a dog bites it must be put to sleep, buried.

A Natural History

Part XIV I know nothing about the dodo.

Passenger pigeons flew in clouds, and like clouds, they evaporated.

All animals are advocates for their own deaths. The bullet finds you only if you let it, and if, then clearly it was meant for you.

If meant, then you have to accept your role in this expanding history of extinction. No, the word’s retirement.

The field is as green as a golf course.

It’s as lively as a parking lot.

Part XV A worm’s heart is not the same as a bird’s. Once tasted the tongue hungers the way one wants for warm breath on her neck or the mouth of an old lover.

But a tongue is not sufficient recompense for lack of a heart.

Digestion translates nothing yet one presents herself to be eaten if not only to be craved. A worm may mistake a bullet for a mate and a bird its reflection for a threat.

A Natural History

Part XV This will be a happy poem.

All that it takes is attitude.

Attitude, and a flower unfurled and wet with gloried life given into your hand. A thorn unplucked draws even more beauty to life.

Not the blood, nor the wound, but the chance to cleanse your flesh and dress your skin until your pain is a thin ache, soon to fade into a scar, though I will know you are finally vulnerable.

Part XVI What vanes find you to the deserts and ghost towns of your happiness those hallowed vacancies of civility deserted, what resides there but half- blind beasts whiling the darkness changing baubles for flower buds and am I a half-blind beast or a bauble or a flower bud, am I hoarder, hoarded or abandoned is the answer as futile as “yes” leaving all this blameless as sand shall I bow and wait in the hollows?

A Natural History

brute beasts, wildly sparpled  Francis Clement

Part XVI I don’t even know what that means.

Why would you say such a thing? I blame myself for giving you a voice.

But what’s done is done, parrot, and I admit your speech has appeal in contrast to a lawnmower.

My voice bothers me enough without echoes, my doubts renewed in mirror tones too much my own.

The worst is your imitating natural sounds. A ringing phone.

An opening door. A hello not my own.

Part XVII She thought she was done.

History, however, had other plans the way one replevies a scab while idly scratching her back.

If there was to be a trial over cause, she wanted an honest likeness with honest intentions, even if she couldn’t understand such a delegate’s foreign tongue but exactly that twist of the heel: Your hypocrisy is not why I left it is what endears me to you.

A Natural History Spectators paid admission fees to Bedlam Hospital, where the keepers exhibited various types of madmen.  David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe

Part XVII Here they are: who we were before intelligence took hold and raised us from the animals.

Or us right after being shoved out our mother’s womb, our senses stark, our tongues cut to the word scream.

Most think this scream blank refusal of the overabundant world, but the scream is throated with joy at all that had been hidden, now revealed.

But the mad. I envy their innocence.

They’re so sure of their certainties.

Part XVIII From the soil grows our certainties the tomato seeds to tomatoes. Were we unable to see the snake in our innocence because of our innocence, did we hold our tongues before holding held revealed? & since, we have beaten, subdued our animals their breaking broken sounds of knowing all twined as vines with our own, sticking out what leaves, flowers, thorns may the world collect & only for light, the food of life stark as the blind acceptance of an ordered refusal where, in neither passion nor pain, we screamed.

A Natural History

Part XVIII

The soil keeps its promises.

Grass rustles up through the dirt arms for the embracing. The worms

clear space for our dearest belongings and fold the earth round our bodies like a mother storing a child’s toys.

No matter whether the child’s dead or grown, the care is the same, museumquality, and as welcoming

to the breath of time. All the old books fall to pieces, and the graves remain for a little longer. But no longer.

Part XIX Longer still the days without reason.

Promises pulled from the garden remain the garden with or without

dirt-caked creases. As tearing pages from books, the narrative unfolds, a plan worms itself into a bird’s beak

welcoming the gapes of young crows.

Belongings are as beginnings, bound museum-like in contemplation of the past.

Bodies in glass houses garden gardens dead as the first day’s reason pulled as a toy from a child’s hands to remain without.