The Tent

Forget the fairy tales, in which I was

your shaggy puppet, prince in hairshirt, surrogate

for human demons.

I’m not your coat, rug, glass-eyed trophy head,

plush bedtime toy, and that’s not me

in outer space with my spangled cub.

I’m not your totem; I refuse

to dance in your circuses; you cannot carve

my soul in stone.

I renounce metaphor: I am not

child-stealer, shape-changer,

old garbage-eater, and you can stuff

simile also: unpeeled,

I am not like a man.

I take back what you have stolen,

and in your languages I announce

I am now nameless.

My true name is a growl.

(Come to think of it, I am not

a British headdress either:

I do not signify bravery.

I want to go back to eating salmon

without all this military responsibility.)

I follow suit, said the lion,

vacating his coats of arms

and movie logos; and the eagle said,

Get me off this flag.

II.

At this the dictionaries began to untwist,

and time stalled and reversed;

the sweaters wound back into their balls of wool,

which rolled bleating out into the meadows;

the perfumes returned to France

and old men there fell sweetly dead

from a surfeit of aroma.

Priests gave their dresses up again

to the women, and the women

ditched their alligator shoes in a hurry

before their former owners turned up to claim them.

The violins of the East Coast shores

took flight from the fingers of their players,

sucking in waltzes, laments, and reels,

landed in Scotland, fell apart

with wailing into their own wood and sinew

and vanished into the trees

and into the guts and howls of long-dead cats

and the tails of knackered horses.

Songs crammed themselves back down

the throats of their singers,

and a billion computers blew apart

and homed in chip by chip

on the brains of the inventors.

Squashed mice were shot backwards out of traps,

brides and grooms uncoupled like shunting trains,

tins of sardines exploded, releasing their wiggling shoals;

dinosaur bones whizzed like missiles

out of museums back to the badlands,

and bullets flew sizzling into their guns.

Glass beads popped off gowns and moccasins

and fell on Italy in a hail of dangerous colour,

as white people disappeared over the Atlantic

in a whoosh of pollution, vainly clutching

their power tools, car keys, and lawn mowers

which dove like metal fish back into the mines;

black people too, recapturing syncopation;

all flowers were suctioned budwise into their stems.

The Native peoples made speedy clearance work

of cowboys and longhorns, but then took off

westward instead, chanting goodbye

to ancestral plains, which were reclaimed

by shaggy mastodons and the precursors of horses

and everywhere

the children shrank and began to

drop teeth and grow hair.

III.

Well, there were suddenly a lot more flamingos

before they in their turn became eggs,

while people’s bodies reverted through their own

flesh genealogies like stepping stones,

man woman man, container into contained,

shedding language and gathering themselves in,

skein after skein of protoplasm

until there was only one of them,

alone at the first naming;

but the streetwise animals, forewarned

and having learned the diverse meanings

of the word dominion,

did not show up,

and Adam, inarticulate, deprived

of his arsenal of proper nouns,

returned to mud

and mud itself became lava

and lava the uncooled earth

and the uncooled earth a swirl of white-hot

energy, and the energy jammed itself

into its own potential, and swirled

like fluorescent bathwater

down a non-existent wormhole.

IV.

I could end this with a moral,

as if this were a fable about animals,

though no fables are really about animals.

I could say: Don’t offend the bear,

don’t tell bad jokes about him,

have compassion on his bear heart;

I could say, Think twice

before you speak.

I could say, Don’t take the name

of anything in vain.

But it’s far too late for that,

because you can’t read this,

because you can’t remember the word for read,

because you are dizzy with aphasia,

because the page darkens and ripples

because it is liquid and unbroken,

because God has bitten his own tongue

and the first bright word of creation

hovers in the formless void

unspoken

THREE NOVELS I WON’T WRITE SOON

1. Worm Zero

In this novel all the worms die. That would include the nematodes. Also anything wormlike in shape, though it may not be a worm proper. Should grubs be included? Should maggots? I’ll know better once I get thoroughly into this thing.

Worms, anyway. Those in the earth, and those in the water. Those inside fish. Those inside dogs. Those inside people, such as pinworms, roundworms, and tapeworms. They die, each and every one. It’s not all downside.

Or it’s not all downside at first. But quite soon—because the earthworms are now defunct, and that’s important—the soil is no longer circulating in the usual fashion. Worm dung is no longer extruded at the surface, wormholes no longer allow rain to penetrate. Valuable nutrients remain sealed in layers of subsoil. Formerly productive fields turn to granite. Crops become stunted and then won’t grow at all. Famine gets going.