Harmless, Recalled as a Fairy Tale

After our rendez-vous—this the last word he said,

Waving to me as the train pulled away from the station.

And so it seemed: harmless. Till evening brought

The first prick of fever, which soon trellised my veins;

At 2 AM came that knock on the city gates,

Little pig, little pig, let me come in. . . .

Ha! ever a bold and warlike people, we didn’t.

Days of siege. We threw corpses dead of plague

From the tops of parapets to frighten it away:

But what was it? That vatic voice was not like his at all,

and by its speech one could tell it somehow knew us well.

The mystery deepened. A strange billowing cloud

Made my people short of breath, I heard them wheezing.

The end seemed near. What could this ailment be?

Hunting out clues, I went over the roses and snows

Of his departed face like a treasure map, over

His words hanging in air like the scrolls of Alexandria.

Had I not been consensual, a free agent,

Gay, single as any singing lark, who

Chooses to unlock, to whom? Well?

One night, finally, I climbed our tallest tower, lay

In the open on its roof and had a brilliant dream.

I saw my body nestled between angels

Like the body of the prophet Jesus, I saw it

Leaking from a finger’s tip like a slit ragdoll.

And then I saw: this feathery, amorphous creature

Black as mildew in the bath, soft as bread mold,

Chewing on my bloodpuddings in the corner.

And then I knew! That morning, I went out by the porter’s door

Pressing one finger to judicious lips like Oedipus.

Your name, I said, I have it now: Despair—

Shrieking, it vanished with brimstone and flames.

So I etched Harmless in that ground of merds and moss

And to this day, my people listen to strangers crying wares

With an intelligent ear, remembering our grave old danger.

Source: Beasts of the Chase (Sarabande Books, 2008)