My Life as a Subject

I

Because I was born in a kingdom,

there was a king. At times

the king was a despot; at other times,

not. Axes flashed in the road

at night, but if you closed your eyes

and sang the old ballads

sitting on the well edge

amongst your kinspeople

then the silver did not appear

to be broken.   

Such were the circumstances.

They made a liar out of me.

Did they change my spirit?

Kith in the night

the sound of owls. A bird fight.

II

We also had a queen,

whetted by the moon. And

we her subjects,

softening in her sight.

III

What one had

the other had to

have too. Soon

parrots bloomed

in every garden, and

every daughter

had a tuning fork

jeweled with emeralds.

IV

Learning to hunt in the new empire,

the king invited his subjects

to send him their knives.

He tested these knives on oranges,

pomegranates, acorn squash,

soft birches, stillborns, prisoners

who had broken rules. He used them

on the teeth of traitors.

V

When strangers massed at the borders,

the courtiers practiced

subjection of the foreign. The court

held a procession

of twine, rope,

gold, knife, light, and

prostitutes with their vials of white

powder. Smoke coursed into the courtyard,

and we wrought hunger upon

the bodies of strangers. I am sure you

can imagine

it, really what need

is there for me to tell you?

You were a stranger once too, and I

brought rope.

VI

Afterward, I always slept,

and let the dealers

come to me alone

with jewels.

VII

In the court at night, we debated

the skin of language,

questioned what might

one day be revealed inside:

a pink and soft fruit,

a woman in a field. . .

Or a shadow, sticky and loose

as old jam. Our own

dialect was abstract,

we wished to understand

not how things were

but what spectacle we might

make from them.

VIII

One day a merchant

brought moving pictures,

the emperor's new delight.

He tacked dark cloth to all

the windows, top

and bottom, and turned

the lights off, cranking the machine like

a needle and thread

making forms into which

we could insinuate our cold

bodies and find warmth. Light; dark.

And the sliding images of courtiers

merrily balancing pineapples

on their heads, as if this

were an adequate story.

IX

And our queen, that hidden

self. What became

of her? Slid into the night

like a statue, and felt

around into shadows,

nothing to prove, all worldly

latitudes, knowing as a spider

in retreat. The web

her mind, and in it, the fly.

X

On Sundays, we flew kites

to ensure our joy

was seen by all those who

threatened

to threaten us. The thread

spooling out up high

in the purple sky

and silver gelatin films being made,

sliding through the cranking machine

so that the barbarians could know

we made images of ourselves

coated in precious metal

and sent them away

indifferent to our wealth.

I miss the citrus

smell of spring

on the plaza filled

with young

and long-limbed kite flyers.

XI

Do I have anything else

to add? Only that

I obeyed my king, my

kind, I was not faithless.

Should I be punished

for that? It is true

some of my pictures creak unhappily

through the spindle.

It is true one day they

came to my house. I know

the powder we coated our fingers

with made us thirsty

and sometimes cruel. But I was born

with a spirit like you.

I have woken, you see,

and I wish to be

made new.