"WHAT YOU CAN KNOW IS WHAT YOU HAVE MADE" —GIANBATTISTA VICO
The dead wren with its blueberry eyes dried and glassy with milk poured the sun into your hair like confetti for the newly fallen.
It unraveled its song and became undone as if it couldn't figure out its own puzzle in its moth and gave up.
I want to say all of this is true but we both know it isn't.
We already know what's at the other end.
We're headed back there now. You undress me knot by knot and beneath the layers of clothes, there's just a pretty bow of me left-- sun-dried with glitter.
• • •
I want it to be easy.
The wren hangs from every branch trying to put itself back together.
It opens and closes in my palm like a widow looking for her husband's face there.
The song becoming the bird becoming the song.
• • •
But what I know of pleasure I learned while putting my clothes back on.
I like to walk naked through the room and pretend I am two lamps falling over.
Your voice has the sound of feet trampling the floor, each boot sinking into its footprint.
• • •
You are lifting me up and dropping me again. You say, open your mouth,
so I do.
I am coming apart at the ends-- each side with its bundle of hair inches closer to the knobby-headed flower barely contained in its own reflection.
So we wrestle into an image smaller than memory can hold in its old brown head.
• • •
No matter which way we turn, it's always the same sound leaving us as we rush to untangle wherever it is we grow old at.
I am never the obedient one. You are never the bride.
I say--feed me the bird-- so you do.
You say--open its beak-- but I can't.
MARCELO HERNANDEZ CASTILLO was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, and is a Canto Mundo fellow, a Zell postgraduate fellow, and the first undocumented student to graduate from the University of Michigan’s MFA program. He’s a Pushcart nominee and has received fellowships to attend the Squaw Writer’s Workshop and the Vermont Studio Center. Recent work can be found in Jubilat, New England Review, The Paris American, and Drunken Boat.
