Aught, no. 1 (1997)

David Hunter Sutherland

Hail Mary

                 "We have been sent to tempt you;
                   do not renounce your faith."
                                             2:102 The Cow

Born in throes
on ridges, vesicles and hair line
cracks of temporal rings,
bones orbit like pebbles
to a rheostat divine.
In a womb whose Septuagint
reads retrograde;
Mars in Ares, Ares in Venus,
you lay vise gripped
with a moloch of indigenous care,
a satyr whose lips on nape
drunk numb and swooning.
Love walls you in to
a stable communicable pain,
beneath stone in dark waters
bides my absolution.
Out! marble imitating flesh,
Push! something into the piscina.
Straws of fatigue or parallax
are snakes, winged archetypes, truant gargoyles.
My obnoxious one
our scatological grace
could not traipse into form
beg your ingenuous glory
pray or nudge the choir into singing...
Hail Mary!

hail mary
fidelis ad urnam
there is salt in your womb,
dust in your nostrils,
blood in the wine.

Prolusory


Locks and tendons and yawing gaps
creep slipshod to a wedded plunge
of sentimental bliss and empathy.
Someone feels for you
hung and half keels for you
over inviolate curves,
trapped between the smalls
of hip and world,
the lower strata upper strata fantasy.
Nature could dare steal back;
so sweet a thing could flourish,
seize all hope beyond recrimination.
Someone gives for you
the illusion grandeur
takes to you,
at equidistant points
between porcelain and chin
over nacre smooth teeth.
One could collapse into rain
huddled over mud-slick earth,
over flesh and loving,
over deciduous pain
and rewound to a shower of breath and lips
that plants an old crop,
tills a new field,
sews a new way.

© 1997 by David Sutherland.  All rights reserved.
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